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AMONG THE VOLUNTEERS who heeded the call of the Islamic State to come to Syria and Iraq and join the army of the caliphate were identical twin brothers from the Ruhr region of western Germany. Unlike most of the ISIS recruits from abroad, Mark and Kevin Knop had not been raised Muslim in an immigrant community.
The blond, blue-eyed lads were born in 1989 in the town of Castrop-Rauxel near the city of Dortmund, where the prevailing religion was Roman Catholic. Their parents were devoted to them. Their father was a police officer. They appeared to have had a conventional childhood, an upbringing dedicated to school and sports. According to an internet-accessible curriculum vitae obtained by the German magazine Der Spiegel, Kevin was the adventuresome one of the pair, in high school venturing abroad to California on a year-long student exchange program.1 In 2009, after graduating from high school and before beginning college, Kevin again spent another year abroad, this time in Istanbul. There he apparently became interested in Islam. When he returned, he entered Ruhr University in Bochum, where he studied law, excelling in a program focused on the legal aspects of energy and mining law. At the same time he began regularly attending a mosque for prayers led by Hasan Celenk, a colleague of the radical Muslim cleric, Abu Walaa, in the northern city of Hildesheim, who is said to have recruited a number of Germans for service to ISIS.2
In the meantime, in 2010 Kevin’s brother, Mark, had signed up for a four-year stint with the German military and served a tour of duty in Afghanistan. He and Kevin kept in touch, and Kevin apparently persuaded Mark to take Islam seriously. In 2012, according to Der Spiegel, during a break from his military obligations, Mark underwent conversion to Islam in a mosque in his hometown, presumably with his brother at his side.3 The German military authorities got wind of Mark’s increasing radicalism, and in 2013 he was declared a security risk and discharged from the army.
In August 2014 the twins told their mother that they were going to Turkey on vacation. They were in fact going to Turkey, but not on vacation. They slipped over the border into Syria and joined the forces of the Islamic State. Their letters home assured their parents that they were well and were filled with heartfelt expressions of commitment to their new faith and to the cause of the Islamic State.
The twins had been with ISIS in Syria and Iraq for only a few months when Mark was assigned to a strategic mission. Early in 2015 ISIS commanders were seeking to cut off the supply line between Baghdad and the city of Fallujah. The critical connection in the supply line was a military base. In a carefully planned assault, in May 2015, ISIS fighters distracted the Iraqi army defenders of the post and were able to open the main gates.4 Mark, now dubbed Abu Mus’ab al-Almani, was at the wheel of an armored military vehicle loaded with seven tons of explosives. He barreled through the opened gates into the heart of the military complex and blew up the vehicle, instantly destroying the base and obliterating everyone around the vehicle, including himself. Weeks later Kevin too conducted a suicide mission. The ISIS online propaganda magazine Dabiq proclaimed them both to be shahid, martyrs, and devoted an article to praising their bravery and their commitment to the faith.
I confess a certain fascination with this case, in part because my own family emigrated from this region of Germany to the United States over a century ago, and the Jürgensmeier family farm still exists in a village not too far from Dortmund. I have had students with Middle Eastern backgrounds who have been targets of ISIS recruitment—fortunately unsuccessful. But this case hits even closer to home: Kevin and Mark could have been my distant cousins.
For most Germans, as for most Americans, the question is Why? Why would these average young men with reasonably successful careers have abandoned it all to seek momentary glory as soldiers for the Islamic State, a mission they must have known would quite likely end the way it did, with their tragic deaths?
Does Religion Lead to War?
One answer to why the German twins pursued a path that led to war and death has to do with religion. The motivations of supporters of ISIS are diverse, however. There is no one answer to why people joined the movement.
In some cases it clearly was for political power and social acceptance. The Sunni mullah whom I met in a Baghdad mosque shortly after the US invasion was quite clear about why his people took part in the resistance: they were fighting for ethnic pride and empowerment. Later, when ISIS emerged as the representative of Sunni claims to political power, it was understandable that many Sunni Arabs would join. As a social group, they had been left out of the power circles of both Iraq and Syria; Shi’a rather than Sunni Muslims were charge. In the ethnoreligious politics of those two countries Sunnis were made to feel like second-class citizens. The Islamic State gave them a land of their own. Whether or not they were interested in the religious aspects of the movement, ISIS employed and empowered Sunni Arabs in what amounted to a Sunnistan of ISIS-controlled territory.
In other cases, especially the thousands of young men and women—perhaps as many as thirty thousand of them—who flocked to the region from around the world, the motives were probably more complicated. When ISIS sent out the call through its glossy media and sophisticated internet social networks, some who felt marginalized in their country of residence may have been attracted to battle in order to find social acceptance. The young Algerians in Brussels, for instance, were members of an immigrant community that was not fully welcome in Belgium. Others may have come for the excitement, as soldiers of fortune seeking the thrill of being part of a glorious battle, whatever it was for. Yet others may have had religious motivations.
Religion could have been the appeal for the German twins. In the brief sketch of their life history in the German media, the progression seems clear: first they became interested in Islam, then they became converts to a fundamentalist form of the faith, and this led them to join ISIS, where they became soldiers in the battlefields of Iraq and Syria and were promptly killed. In the narrative supplied in newspaper and magazine articles, the implication is fairly predictable: their interest in religion led to their participation in war.
Behind this narrative is the assumption that religion has the capacity to drive people to war. That is an interesting assumption. To test it empirically, one would have to isolate religious factors from all other possible motivations and see if religion in fact was the driving force. I know of no study that has done that, at least successfully, so we are left with anecdotal accounts that are subject to the observer’s prejudices. The question remains: How likely is it that religion by itself leads to violence?
In The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State, the journalist Graeme Wood explores the role of religion in the background of ISIS activists.5 The book is based on interviews with supporters of the radical Salafi Islamic school on which the ISIS ideology relies heavily. Though Wood never says it, the focus on religious ideas alone may give readers the impression that this is what leads to violence. This impression is buttressed by the way the book is structured. It starts with the Salafi views expressed by an Egyptian tailor and goes on to more radical versions of that vision. A discussion of Salafi fundamentalism proceeds to Salafi thinking about jihad. The discussion about fighting the forces of evil leads in turn to the role of religious ideas in real acts of violence. For many readers, the implication will be clear: radical religious ideas lead to violence. Thinking about the world in terms of confrontation leads to real conflicts.
Curiously, though, none of the men Wood interviewed for his book actually went to the front lines; none literally picked up a sword or donned a suicide belt in defense of his version of the faith. Wood tells us that most Salafi Muslims are nonviolent; even those who espouse a jihadi worldview seldom act on it in violent ways, including those whom Wood interviewed. Some of those who do act violently were described in an earlier article by Wood in the New Republic that identified three types of people who fight for ISIS: “psychopaths,” “true believers,” and “Sunni pragmatists.” Presumably the religious motivations are characteristic of only the “true believers”—but it is still not clear why some “true believers” go to Syria and Iraq to fight and others stay home and cheer them on.
I conducted my own interviews among refugees in Iraq who had fled from ISIS-controlled areas and had lived in Mosul and Ramadi and other areas of Iraq under ISIS control. I asked them whether they thought the fighters’ motivations were political or religious. Most agreed that their motives were political, although one thought for a moment and ventured that the motivations may have been partly religious, but that it was “a strange religion.”6 It was not his kind of Islam. When I interviewed actual ISIS fighters in prison in 2019 after the end of the conflict, I found that their motives were mixed: some proclaimed that the idea of an Islamic caliphate was the main attraction; others focused on the mistreatment of their Sunni Arab communities in Iraq and Syria as the reason for their anger and the attraction of a Sunni-led ISIS regime.
So it remains unclear whether or to what extent religion is the key to understanding the choice to participate in the ISIS movement. Though I do not discount the possibility of a role for religion, it seems to me that it would have to be examined on a case-by-case basis. I don’t think it’s fair to assume that, because religion is in the background, it is what has propelled people into violence.
But this is precisely the assumption that is popular with a certain segment of the general public in Europe and the US. The idea that religion leads to violence has become almost a mantra. Leading the charge are several aggressive atheists, such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, who contend that the very nature of religion leads to violence. “Religion causes war because it generates certainty,” Dawkins is frequently quoted as saying, and that recent acts of terrorism were motivated by religion because “only religious faith is [a] strong enough force to motivate such utter madness in otherwise sane and decent people.”7 Harris, a neuroscientist, chimes in with what seems to him obvious, that “religion is the most prolific source of violence in our history.”8
On the other side are the sympathizers of religion, who feel called upon to defend it against what they contend are spurious claims. In a well-researched book, Fields of Blood, Karen Armstrong surveys the history of religion’s relationship to violent actions. She analyzes specific cases in depth and concludes that these are political confrontations in which religious language is used to justify and support a conflict that is based on social confrontation and the acquisition of power. Armstrong ends with this observation: “The problem lies not in the multifaceted activity that we call ‘religion’ but in the violence embedded in our human nature and the nature of the state.”9
I tend to agree with Armstrong more than with Dawkins in this debate, but I’m not really comfortable with either side. What is missing from both is an exploration of the actual role that religious language and ideas play in real situations involving violence. Is religion simply part of the social identity of people who are fighting for their community? Are leaders of the battle clerics who rely on religious authority for their leadership? Do they use the flag of religion to urge the faithful into war? Or is it the case that scripture inspires people to slay the infidels, any infidels who may be at hand? One would have to examine each instance to determine the role of religious ideas or images or scriptures or leadership or social identity in each individual act of violence.
Behind all of these questions about how particular aspects of religion may be related to violence is a more fundamental question: Is religion an entity that can cause anything at all, let alone violence?
This is indeed a basic question, and it touches philosophic depths. Karl Marx asserted that social conditions give rise to ideas, rather than ideas producing social change. In so doing, Marx claimed that he “stood Hegel on his head.”10 Mainstream social science is hardly Marxist, but it owes something to him and other early sociologists. In general, ideology is thought to emerge from social relations and not the other way around. It is partly for this reason that religion is often ignored in the social sciences.
As a social scientist myself, I tend to accept this materialist perspective, and my instinct is to question whether ideas of any sort play a major role in motivating social actions. When presented with a religious or other ideological worldview, I usually want to know who holds these ideas and why and what is in it for them. I don’t absolutely deny that ideas, including religious ideas, can play an important role, but my instinct is to see these ideas in social, economic, and political contexts rather than as disembodied entities that can influence things on their own.
Still, as I have said, I agree with Robert Bellah that religion is something. Maybe it is not an entity, but it is a collective perception, a worldview, an alternative reality. As an alternative reality it provides a template of meaning for people who have embraced that perception. The end-times worldview of premillennialist Evangelical Christians provides believers with the conviction that behind ordinary reality is the contestation of great forces of good and evil, and that at any moment the world as we know it may be interrupted by dramatic, transformative events, like the Rapture and the tribulations described in the Book of Revelation. But does that belief in an alternative religious reality lead in some cases to violence? It is an interesting question. Certainly another construct of alternative reality—war—almost by definition leads to violence. So we might ask how the alternative reality of religion is related to the alternative reality of war.
War and religion play roles in human imagination that are so similar they could easily reinforce one another. Both provide alternative perceptions of order, ways of seeing the world that absorb anomalies and explain why chaos and disorder exist; they explain and ultimately contain and control these untidy and dangerous aspects of life. War’s alternative reality is a this-worldly version, and religion offers a transcendent vision, but they function so similarly that the two are often found in tandem. War frequently utilizes religion, and religion often incorporates images of war.
Still, war and religion are perceptions of reality—alternative realities. They are not entities capable of action on their own. Neither war nor religion is an agent that can do things by itself. When I say “war leads to violence,” I mean that war’s perception of a world locked in absolute moral conflict can provide justifications for acts of violence within that sphere of reference. The degree to which religion is involved in the justification of violence depends on the relation of religion to war.
There are several ways to think about this relationship. When we think of war embracing religion, we usually mean those occasions when religious images, ideas, and organizations are employed to buttress notions of war. When we say that religion embraces war, we usually mean those moments when images of war are crafted to buttress ideas about religion. The relationship between religion and war depends on which perception of reality is the dominant one.
When War Embraces Religion
Let us return to the problem of Kevin and Mark, the German twins who became jihadis and martyrs. Why did they do it? What was the appeal? Were they in it for the religion or for the war?
At one point in Wood’s book, he reports a conversation with an Algerian supporter of the Islamic State who defended the movement against the charge that it violated the principles of Islam. Responding to Wood’s assertion that ISIS had too much “killing, slavery, amputation,” the man said that he understood, but he explained in simple terms why it all made sense: “This is a war.”11
The implication is that in this case, war trumped religion. He may have seen ISIS ideology as the fulfillment of Islamic prophecy. He may have agreed that ordinarily religion is a moderating force regarding the use of violence. Most Muslims, including most Muslims of the extremist Salafi variety, are nonviolent. But when it came to the necessities of acquiring power and administering control, the Islamic State had to do what it had to do. This meant following the dictates of war.
This is something that anyone can understand, from marginalized Sunni Arabs in Iraq to disaffected immigrant youth in Brussels who have been raised on battle-saturated video games. ISIS has proclaimed that a war is going on, a big war, and it has opened its doors to anyone who wishes to join the adventure. The language of religion helps, to be sure. Even the most ignorant fighters are reassured when they are told that this view of war is authenticated by scripture and tradition and is legitimate, although they might not know or even want to know the specifics. For them the fighting is the point: to be engaged in a great battle that will give their life meaning.
Thomas Hegghammer, a Norwegian author who has followed ISIS perhaps more closely than any other scholar, has written extensively about “jihadi culture.” He argues that the allure of the movement does not mainly lie in its ideas but in its total worldview, a view of a world at war, a war sustained by a diverse remnant of the faithful who have created their own community and culture.12 Their worldview is everything. Their community and culture are all-encompassing. But these are not solely social and political entities, and they are not secular. Religious ideas do play an important and formative role and have helped to frame their disturbing and destructive worldview.
In virtually every war—especially a great war, a war of a magnitude that threatens the very existence of a people and their culture—God is enlisted on both sides. A videotape smuggled out of Afghanistan soon after 9/11 shows Osama bin Laden using his hands to depict the moment when the two airplanes struck the Twin Towers. It might have looked to many like boasting. But the Al-Qaeda leader quickly corrected that impression, saying that this was a great act of God, and its success was due to God’s graciousness.
At that very moment flags were waving throughout the United States in solidarity against the perpetrators of the act that brought down the towers. “God Bless America” was everywhere on bumper stickers, and that patriotic anthem rang out throughout the country. Soon God appeared to be backing the war on terror, as the fervor of religiosity was fused with the fever of war, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. On the eve of the attack on Fallujah in 2004, one American commander13 rallied his troops with the clear message that their assault was directed by God. It was not true that they were fighting an unseen enemy; he knew who the enemy was and his name was Satan. The overwhelming majority of military chaplains in all branches of the U.S. armed forces are Evangelical Protestants for whom the language of religious war comes quite easily.
Warfare often unites nationalism with religious purpose—fighting for “God and country.” In time of warfare few leaders can resist the temptation to claim God for their side. Fewer still would emulate the humility that Abraham Lincoln purportedly displayed when asked whether God was on the Union side in the Civil War. Lincoln was quoted as saying that he did not know which side God was on, but he certainly hoped that he himself was on God’s side.
Religion is an attractive ally in time of warfare because it provides a host of benefits. Religious language frames the contest in absolute terms and clarifies the all-or-nothing nature of the struggle. It demonizes opponents and valorizes the leaders of one’s own side. Religion provides moral justification for killing and eternal rewards for martyrs. Religious institutions offer a ready-made network for recruitment and provide the blessings of moral authorities. Religious images can personalize a political struggle, showing that the foe is responsible for one’s own hardships and that political success is tied to spiritual redemption that is personally experienced. In this sense, war can be seen as part of religion’s essentially transformative promise of salvation.
The ideas that witches exist, or Jews are a problem, or all Muslims are terrorists are inventions of a shared perception. All of these claims belong to alternative worldviews of war in which evil enemies needed to be invented in order for that worldview to be viable. Someone has to be the scapegoat. This is where religion provides conceptual support for a war worldview.
Since I have defined war as the moral absolutism of social conflict, one might well ask whether all wars are to some extent religious wars. I think the answer is, in part, yes. Because all wars involve the conviction that enemies are evil and good must prevail, ideas of religion are often in the background. As we have seen, it is easy for sacred language and images to be enlisted for a military cause. Most wars are thought (or at least said) to be conducted for a high moral purpose, and often this means proclaiming them to be blessed by God. There is a sliding scale between worldly war and religious war, between military actions that represent rational calculations for the sake of civil order and those that are seen as manifestations of a sacred struggle. Those who think about how we might live in a world without war must deal with the religious dimensions of the construct—the images of spiritual war that may be lurking behind military operations and their public supporters—as well as with the worldly causes for which a war might be waged.
When Religion Embraces War
The German twins Kevin and Mark may well have been lured into the jihadi struggle by the glamor of war. Mark had already served a tour of duty in Afghanistan and perhaps was eager to enter into a conflict that he saw as more meaningful and in which his role was more direct. It probably helped that the jihad was justified by his newfound religion.
Then again, religion might have been his primary motivation and war simply a burdensome commitment that came with the package. Ordinarily, however, when images of warfare appear within religious worldviews those images are sanitized and bent toward the purposes of religion. They are meant to validate the religious worldview by means of analogies and symbols. For that reason, religious ideas themselves seldom lead to actual war.
This may seem a surprising claim—that when religious language speaks of war it does not often lead to a real fighting war. After all, images of warfare are ubiquitous in religion. Wherever you turn in the history and mythology of religious traditions you bump into war, whether the great conflicts of the Hindu epics the Ramayana and Mahabharata; the wars between Buddhist and Tamil kings in the Sri Lankan chronicles; the grand adventures of Japanese and Chinese Buddhist warriors; the biblical accounts of warfare in the books of Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and 1 Samuel; or the triumphant wars of Islamic tradition that can be traced back to the military exploits of the Prophet. In the case of Christianity, as depicted in the Left Behind novels, we find the ultimate war before the last judgment. It would seem that warfare is an image that religion can scarcely do without.
It is true that the idea of warfare has become internalized in most religious traditions. At the very beginning of the Bible, in the book of Genesis, the creation of the world is presented as the triumph of order over chaos. This narrative is thought to have its origins in earlier Babylonian mythology about the war against chaos, Chaoskampf, as it is known to textual scholars. In the ancient Babylonian epic the Enuma Elish, the world is created by conquering the chaos monster, who is split in half, separating the earth from the heavens, exactly the way it is described in the first book of Genesis (Genesis 1:6–8).
The war between good and evil within each person is a frequent theme in most religious traditions. It is what jihad means to most pious Muslims: the battle for purity that rages within each person’s heart. When I was a teenager growing up in the Protestant Bible Belt of the American rural Midwest, itinerant preachers would come to revival meetings and preach about the battle of the spirit that we young people were faced with, urging us to gird our loins and side with the good. I recall one preacher dressed in camouflage-patterned fatigues proclaiming that there was a real war going on—a real war between good and evil. It was necessary for each of us to make a decision right there and then, a decision for Christ that we would join the struggle and tip the battle against Satan and the forces of evil.
Our Protestant hymns were full of battle. We were exhorted to march “onward, Christian soldiers,” as if we were “going on to war.” Other hymns challenged us to “stand up, stand up for Jesus” as “soldiers of the cross,” to fight “the good fight,” and struggle “manfully onward” to subdue the enemy, identified in this case as “dark passions,” and as teenagers we knew what that meant. Harriet Crabtree, a scholar of popular Protestantism, surveyed the common images in what she called the “popular theologies” projected in the hymns, tracts, and sermons of modern Protestant Christianity. She found that the “model of warfare” was one of the most enduring and pervasive.14 The Protestant writer Arthur Wallis argues in his book Into Battle that “Christian living is war.” For Wallis this is not “a metaphor or a figure of speech” but a “literal fact”; however, “the sphere, the weapons, and the foe” are spiritual rather than material.15
The Indic traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism present a panoply of battle images. We have discussed the fierce battles that consume much of the narrative of the two great Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The Theravada Buddhist text, the Mahavamsa, chronicles great battles between Sinhalese Buddhist and Tamil kings. The calendar art of popular Sikh culture vividly portrays the bloody encounters with the Moghuls including the martyrdom of two of the founding gurus in the Sikh lineage, Guru Arjan and Guru Tegh Bahadur. Though he was beheaded in a military encounter with the Mogul army, some calendar art portrays another Sikh hero, Baba Deep Singh, as still fighting manfully on, sword in one hand, and his severed head in the other.
What should we make of these tales of bloody battles and gory images? Sikh theologians and writers, like their Christian counterparts, explain such stories about warfare allegorically. They point to the war between belief and unbelief that rages in each person’s soul. Interpreters of Jewish and Islamic culture have transformed the martial images in their traditions in a similar way, for example as seen among those Muslim writers who speak of the true jihad as the one within each person’s soul. The chroniclers of the Hebrew Bible have interpreted acts of war as God’s vengeance, undertaken by the divine so that humans will not have to fight.
Thus violent images have been given religious meaning and been domesticated by them. Although presented visually and in stories as terribly real, these violent acts have been sanitized; they have been stripped of their horror by being invested with religious meaning. They have been justified because they are part of a religious template that is even larger than myth and history; they have become elements of a ritual scenario in which people can experience vicariously the drama of transcendent war.
In most religious portrayals of warfare, religion rises above the messiness of life, its disorder and its end in death. When religious cultures portray warfare as acknowledged and ultimately controlled, they offer an almost cosmological reenactment of the primacy of order over chaos. When the creators of the stained-glass windows of the great European cathedrals portrayed Christ as king, emerging from his grave like a general victorious in battle, they were asserting something fundamental about Christianity (and every other religious tradition): religion affirms the primacy of order over disorder, of life over death. To make this point, however, violence and other forms of disorder must be vividly portrayed and ultimately conquered.
The irony of these bloody images is that faith has always longed for peace. But in order to portray a state of harmony convincingly, religion has to show disharmony and portray its ability to contain it. Religion has dealt with violence not only because it is unruly and has to be tamed but because religion, as the ultimate statement of meaningfulness, always has to assert the primacy of meaning in the face of chaos.
It is also true, however, that people within all religious traditions have engaged in real violence in ways that incorporate religious symbols and images. Followers of the Shiv Sena in India—the “army of Lord Shiva”—have appropriated the image of Shiva’s sword in savage attacks on Muslims in the city of Ahmadabad. Christians have entered battle with the hope that God was on their side, and Muslims have waged what they have characterized as holy wars.
Critics of religion like Dawkins and Harris rush in, pointing to these examples as proof of how religion leads to violence. They have a point, of course, since religion has undeniably been an element in many instances of violence in recent years as well as throughout history. But it returns us to the question of causation: Is religion using war in these instances, or is war using religion? It is true, as Dawkins says, that the language of religion is absolutist, sometimes dogmatic, but so are many other totalizing ideologies so are many other totalizing ideologies. Is there anything about religion that by itself conduces to violence?
One of the most peculiar notions—oddly popular in the general literature—is that violent images in scripture inspire the faithful to act in a similar way in real life. The idea, I take it, is that people may be sitting in their comfortable living-room chair reading scripture, and when they come to the passages about war they will suddenly be so fired up that they will run out of the house, sword in hand, looking for infidels to slay on the spot.
I suppose such a scenario is possible, but it’s not likely. There are millions of Muslims in Asia—where most of the world’s Muslims live—who read the Qur’an faithfully and do not seem to be propelled toward violence. Violence associated with Islam seems to occur mostly in areas of the world with severe social and political tensions. Moreover there are even more millions of Christians and Jews reading scriptures that are even bloodier than the Qur’an, and few of them seem to be motivated to violence simply on the weight of textual examples. It seems unlikely that biblical texts or theological positions in themselves lead anyone into warfare and violence.
Dawkins is a biologist and Harris is a neuroscientist. Neither is a scholar of religion. No scholar of religion would say what they say without careful qualification and evidence to support his or her position.
Hector Avalos is one genuine scholar of religion who does argue that religion itself conduces to violence, but his approach is quite different from that of Dawkins and Harris. Rather than firing a broadside against the history of religion in general, Avalos takes seriously the notion of religion as alternative reality, as a worldview. His argument is that the idea of religion involves a scarce resource, spiritual truth, and that competition over this asset is what may lead to violence.16 It is an interesting argument, though not one that has gained much acceptance. In any event it is quite different from the simplistic idea that reading violent scriptures leads to violent actions.
Most religious studies scholars would agree that the role of warfare in religious language and tradition is ordinarily metaphorical. When religion is overtly a part of warfare, as in the case of the Shiv Sena in India or some Christian militias in the United States, we usually find that war is using religion. When war embraces religion, war is exalted and religion is servile to its purposes. But when religion embraces war, religion is exalted and war is the symbolic servant, and a domestic servant at that. War is thus neutered by religion. Only rarely is religion involved in warfare in a more direct way.
When War and Religion Are Fused: Cosmic War
When people like the German twins convert to a new religious belief, they are usually not motivated to go to war. But the German twins were ready for war, it seemed, as soon as they completed their religious conversion—or perhaps because of it. What made their situation different? Where they attracted to war or to religion? Or could they have been attracted to both?
One of my students told a story that sheds light on how ISIS recruits new converts to the cause. Ayman (not his real name) was raised in southern California. His family was originally Palestinian, and he wanted to become more proficient in Arabic, so he took the opportunity of a summer language immersion program in Amman, Jordan. There he had a revealing and frightening encounter.
Ayman had befriended several Jordanians his own age. One afternoon they asked him if he wanted to join them on an outing. “Sure,” he said, eager to get to know the local culture better, to practice his Arabic, and to bond in fellowship with his new friends.
With two of his friends, he piled into a car driven by someone he had not previously met. Another newcomer was there as well. They began driving toward the mountains on a route that seemed purposely circuitous. Before long Ayman was confused about the direction from which they had come and equally uncertain about where they were going. The car stopped to accept another stranger, and Ayman began to become suspicious about the purpose of the outing.
The afternoon light was fading by the time they reached their destination, a hilltop surrounded by a grove of trees. They left the car and spread out in a circle in a clearing, enjoying the twilight calm, the breeze, and the distant mountain views. The driver began talking, and the others were clearly deferential to him and respectful of his message. He wanted Ayman to know how special he was, he said, in associating with more than one culture. But he should not forget where his people came from or their suffering.
The message became increasingly personal. Others in the circle began to add to the driver’s comments. They talked about Ayman’s obligations to his community and to himself, the need to seek a more meaningful existence, to be a part of something more important than oneself. They also talked about a coming apocalyptic moment in world history. There would be a confrontation between the forces of good and evil, and he could be a part of that momentous struggle.
At this point Ayman was beginning to get the picture, and it was a picture he didn’t like. He thanked them for their friendship and their insights and asked them to return him to his room. At first they wanted to talk with him further, but seeing that he was not ready to be receptive, they relented and told him to think about what they had said and they would discuss it again.
There was no second meeting, however, and Ayman made sure to keep a respectful distance from the friends who had brought him to the hilltop. I asked him whether he thought they were trying to recruit him into their view of religion or into war. He seemed puzzled by the question, and after a moment’s hesitation corrected me, saying, “They were trying to recruit me into ISIS.”
He had a point. For this recruiting party, as perhaps for the German twins, ISIS was both religion and war. We have already considered the phenomena of war embracing religion and of religion embracing war. ISIS offered an intriguing third option, in which it appears that the religion is war and the war is the religion.
In an interesting book, ISIS Apocalypse, William McCants makes the argument that the worldview of ISIS is a vision of sacred confrontation that is both religion and war.17 Probing the theology of the ISIS leadership, McCants shows that their ideas are rooted in a marginal Islamic notion of extreme prophecy. Not altogether unlike premillennial Evangelical Protestants, ISIS leaders imagined that history is moving toward a cataclysmic confrontation between the forces of good and evil that will result in a whole new era of righteous order. The main difference between the Christian end-time beliefs and the ISIS apocalypse is that the ISIS leaders have thought that before the savior comes—the Mahdi in prophetic Muslim apocalyptic thinking—a new caliphate has to be established by means of real battles conducted by righteous Muslim soldiers. In other words, their religious worldview is a world of war.
Not all supporters of ISIS bought into this apocalyptic scenario, at least not as enthusiastically as many of the leaders. My interviews with Sunni Arabs in Iraq, including former ISIS fighters and refugees from ISIS-held territories, suggest that most of the ISIS foot soldiers from the region were motivated by a desire for Sunni Arab empowerment. And many of the foreigners who have flocked to the region have been drawn by the allure of war, any war. They craved the excitement and thrill of a slightly sketchy, dangerous encounter, without any apparent real knowledge of or even interest in the theology behind the war worldview.
There is no question, however, that the apocalyptic image of righteous religious war is what appealed to some of the former ISIS fighters I interviewed and most of the movement’s leaders. And it is what has animated them. In The Way of the Strangers, Wood says that for many of the followers of ISIS, “this war is the main event in human history—not a skirmish decades away from the end.” He quotes the Swedish scholar Magnus Ranstorp, a former director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism at St. Andrews University in Scotland, as saying that for those who embrace this vision of religious war, joining the Islamic State is “better than getting tickets to the World Cup,” since it’s like being able to “play in the championship and score a goal.”18
This is an instance where religion and war are fused. This fusion creates a powerful construct of human imagination that elsewhere I have called “cosmic war.”19 It refers to the idea of a radical divine intervention in human history, an existential battle between religion and irreligion, good and evil, order and chaos. It is a remarkable combination of the concept of religion and the idea of war that is often expressed in real war and not just in its literary and legendary representations. When it takes on a life of its own and is not contained within the symbolic language of religion, it can present a whole new kind of alternative reality that is both religious and bellicose.
Even when one embraces the idea of cosmic war, however, real war does not necessarily follow. We have seen that some Christians have taken the idea of apocalyptic war from the book of Revelation, as portrayed in the Left Behind novels, and have imagined it as cosmic war without actually fighting anyone because of it. They do believe, however, that current events are evidence that it is coming to pass. The cataclysm described in Revelation 16 includes a battle, but it also involves a series of acts of nature presumably triggered by God: “flashes of lightning, loud noises, peals of thunder, and a great earthquake such as had never been since men were on the earth” (Revelation 16:18). Islands would vanish and mountains would be leveled (16:20). At the culmination of the conflict the old world would be swept away and “a new heaven and a new earth” would be established (21:1). A new holy city, a new Jerusalem would rise up and God would dwell with the inhabitants. “Behold,” the book says, “I make all things new” (21:5). Some Christian activists have seen the global war on terror as signaling that apocalyptic moment described in Revelation. It is cosmic war, God’s war, a war predicted in the Bible.
Millenarian movements have erupted more than once in Christian history, often in response to dire social and economic conditions. Norman Cohn has chronicled some such movements that arose in Europe’s late Middle Ages, including the Anabaptists, the Ranters, and the movement led by the theocratic king John of Leiden, who took over the city of Münster in 1534.20 Other religious traditions also contain apocalyptic visions similar to the second coming that is awaited in Christianity. In Judaism it is a first coming, in that the Messiah, David, has not yet appeared for the first time. It is his coming that is anticipated by Messianic Jewish Zionists in Israel who want to take over the West Bank to prepare the biblical land of Israel for his return. Rabbi Meir Kahane described this as “catastrophic Messianism”: the Messiah will arrive after a period of real earthly conflict.21 In Hinduism there is the expectation that Kalki, a future avatar of Vishnu, will return in the golden age of Satyayug. According to the German religious studies scholar Perry Schmidt-Leukel, this Hindu idea is picked up by Buddhists in the eleventh century, with the Kalki figure reimagined as a redemptive Bodhisattva.22 This idea in turn influenced Islam. So the notion of a savior figure at the end of days is not unique in religious history. But it is not necessarily the occasion for earthly war.
Most believers in the end times, and most readers of the Left Behind novels, are not violent. They are willing to accept that this cosmic war, if it ever occurs in the real world in real time, will come in the future, most likely after their own lifetime. Or if they expect it to happen sooner it will be like an act of God, a sudden event over which they have no control. It is not something that they will actively engage in by plotting attacks on secularists or acts of terror against secular authorities.
Some end-time activists, however, do see themselves as part of the struggle now. They think that the end times are already upon us and the time has come for them to take up arms, to defend the righteous and sow fear in the hearts of the secular enemy. In Christian compounds in Arizona and Idaho, they have created survivalist communities where they are hunkered down, heavily armed and self-sufficient, preparing to do battle with the secular authorities if necessary. At Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 one white separatist and end-times believer, Randy Weaver, engaged in an eleven-day standoff and shootout with the FBI that resulted in the deaths of a federal marshal, Weaver’s wife, and one of his sons.
Some Islamic activists also see their struggle as part of a cosmic war. They may, like the leaders of the Islamic State, imagine that they are entering into an apocalyptic struggle at the end of history, or they may accept that the cosmic war will ultimately be waged on a transcendent plane, and the earthly skirmishes of the present are but the harbingers of a more glorious confrontation to come. The ninth section of the Qur’an urges the faithful to stand up in righteous defense against “people who have violated their oaths and intended to expel the Messenger” and those who “attack you first” (Surah 9:13). The historical context is the seventh century CE, when the fledgling Muslim community was struggling to survive in a hostile environment on the Arabian Peninsula. However, some Muslims take this Qur’anic passage as a clue that a cosmic war is even now being waged in transcendent time, and the faithful are being called to struggle against those who would try to destroy them and their religion. Like the battles in the New Testament Book of Revelation and the Hebrew Bible, it is ultimately not a human battle but God’s war: “Fight against them so that Allah will punish them by your hands and disgrace them and give you victory over them and heal the breasts of a believing people” (Surah 9:14).
Curiously this idea of ultimate apocalyptic war recently surfaced in faraway Japan. Borrowing the name of the battlefield in the final confrontation described in Revelation 16, the Buddhist Aum Shinrikyo leader, Shoko Asahara, described his own vision of Armageddon. This apocalypse, he predicted, would rival World War II in its destructiveness. Most Japanese would take this to mean something even more horrific than the nuclear annihilation that was visited on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Asahara prophesied that such nuclear devastation would be multiplied and compounded with biological and chemical nerve gas attacks. The movement’s imagined enemies were a paranoid cornucopia of political powers and social groups, from the Japanese government and the US military to the Freemasons. The Aum Shinrikyo imagined itself to be the lone defender of all that was good in civilization. Their terrorist attack in 1995 was meant to illustrate this imagined view of religion and war, and by illustrating it bring it into reality. If the sarin gas they unleashed in the Tokyo subways had been a purer strain, tens or even hundreds of thousands of Japanese commuters could have been killed. In the event, twelve innocent subway riders perished in an agonizing way, and six thousand were injured. Asahara was tried and convicted for his part in this incident of terrorism, and in 2018 he was finally executed along with six of his co-conspirators.
The ideas of spiritual battle found in scripture are employed by activists in such disparate movements as the Aum Shinrikyo, the Christian right, and militant Islam. They are shadows of the war images that exist within the worldviews of many religious traditions on a symbolic level. These images are played out in the legends and stories of most traditions on an epic scale. Ordinarily images of cosmic war are confined to myth and symbol, but when they are superimposed on real-world social and political confrontations those who believe in them can be swept up into a grand scenario of warfare. Conflicts over territory and political control are elevated to the high proscenium of sacred drama. Such images of cosmic war are metajustifications for religious violence. They not only explain why religious violence happens—why religious persons feel victimized by violence and why they need to take revenge for this violence—but also furnish a comprehensive worldview, a template of meaning in which religious violence makes sense. Righteous people are pressed into service as soldiers and great confrontations occur in which noncombatants are killed. But ultimately the righteous will prevail, for cosmic war is, after all, God’s war. And God cannot lose.
The idea of cosmic war has much in common with Clausewitz’s notion of the ideal type of war, war in its purest form—“absolute war.” It is the image of a great confrontation between two sides locked in an all-or-nothing struggle, a confrontation so grand and complete that it is almost always confined to the imagination and to representations in myth and legend. Forms of this apocalyptic narrative are found in popular culture—in the Left Behind novels, for example, and in such video games as Fortnite and Counter-Strike. What makes the idea of cosmic war different from absolute war, however, is the nature of the struggle. Cosmic war is a contest not just between two earthly combatants but between essential forces of reality. It has an existential valence; it is a fight between good and evil, right and wrong, order versus chaos.
I have not used the term “holy war” to describe this union of religion and war for several reasons. One is that holy war is usually associated with Islamic ideas, and the notion of cosmic war exists in virtually every religious tradition; it is not solely Muslim. Moreover distinctions are sometimes made by scholars and activists between holy war and divine war; one is war undertaken on behalf of God, and the other is war imagined to be carried out by God. Holy war is not quite cosmic war since it is somewhat limited by moral and social constraints, in the way that Clausewitz speaks of the political and social limitations placed on absolute war; “just war” is even more explicitly limited by the moral rules that it places on military engagement. Cosmic war, however, has no such limitations. It is absolute war on an existential level.
When cosmic war bursts from its confinement in myth and legend and is transposed onto real earthly confrontations—such as the territorial raids of the Islamic State—it can change the nature of the conflict. For one thing it expands the horizons of the confrontation. It expands them spatially in that cosmic war is not confined to one region or location on earth but rather is a manifestation of a global conflict between forces of good and forces of evil. It is also expansive in a temporal sense, for cosmic war can endure beyond one’s lifetime and still ultimately end in victory.
When I challenged Dr. Abdul Aziz Rantisi, the political head of Hamas, regarding the efficacy of Hamas’s methods—especially suicide attacks––against the powerful Israeli army, he acknowledged that it would be difficult for Hamas to triumph in his own lifetime, or even in his children’s lifetime.23 But in his children’s children’s lifetime, Rantisi said, his face brightening, “we may succeed.” He declared that they could not possibly lose since this was not their own battle but “God’s war.” In a cosmic war, defeat in a skirmish or the deaths of warriors are temporary setbacks in a struggle that could persist for decades, even eons, because it is in God’s time. But because it is “God’s war,” as Rantisi put it, the ultimate outcome has been preordained, and the virtuous side will prevail.
In a real-life conflict the notion of cosmic war is useful in recruiting warriors. It promises them personal redemption and heavenly rewards. Cosmic war is a social construct that is usually shared by a group of people who collectively are defensive or disturbed about the world. The idea of cosmic war gives clarity to their confusion and direction to their anger. It is also intensely personal. It challenges individuals to accept this worldview in a conversion experience and provides personal rewards, including spiritual transformation and redemption. The “Last Instructions” manual found in the car of one of the 9/11 hijackers after his death specified rites of purification to be performed before the final mission. This was a sign that perishing in the suicide attack would make the hijackers martyrs and redeem them in the afterlife.
Cosmic war can promise other heavenly rewards, although the importance of this has perhaps been exaggerated. Much is made of a promise in the Qur’an that all pious Muslim men will receive sensual rewards in heaven, consorting with virgins. Some stories about the Prophet (in the hadith) that were written after the revelations of the Qur’an specify that the number of virgins will be seventy-two and that they will have almond-shaped eyes and large breasts. However, the videotaped last testaments of young Palestinian men who have volunteered for acts of suicide terrorism do not dwell on these heavenly rewards, but rather on how they will be remembered in the community’s history and that their act will make something positive of their lives. They also expect to be exalted in heaven as part of their spiritual rewards.
Others have joined the jihadi mission hoping for earthly rewards. Their spiritual quest might be fused with hopes for earthly power, privilege, and acceptance in the jihadi community. Many have seen in ISIS a glimmer of hope for their sense of self-worth, the hope that the caliphate will transform not only Syria and Iraq but their own lives and put to rights a world askew. A teenage follower of the ISIS cyber network living in Canada, reached online by the Canadian scholar Amarnath Amarasingam, reported that his parents were taking away his computer to prevent him from being in contact with the ISIS network. They wouldn’t succeed, he said, as he had other ways to get online. He needed this connection, he explained, because he felt more true to himself online with the jihadi network than in any other aspect of his teenage Canadian existence. He added, “I never felt like I’ve belonged anywhere until I met the brothers and sisters online.”24
Was this what animated the German twins Kevin and Mark when they joined the movement? Were they seeking meaning in life and a profound sense of mission and community, or were they also seeking transcendent rewards? We will never know which of the promises of cosmic war appealed to them or why they so willingly gave their lives to the Islamic State’s cause. We do not know whether they sought religious fulfillment, the thrill of war, or both in the fusion of religion and war I have called cosmic war. My guess is that it was some combination of these, that cosmic war was likely in their imagination. This is the template of religious war that the ISIS propaganda arm has displayed in its online magazine Dabiq and is echoed in chatter among the global jihadi cyber community on social media. If Kevin and Mark entered into that world, it was both thrilling and redemptive, engaging and ennobling. They likely fell into its black hole, a dark alternative world of cosmic war, from which they would not return.
Notes
1.Jorg Diehl and Roman Lehberger, “Islamischer Staat is Wirbt mit Terror Zwillingen aus Deutschland,” Spiegel Online, May 27, 2015, http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/islamischer-staat-is-wirbt-mit-terror-zwillingen-aus-deutschland-a-1035688.xhtml. The twins’ last names were usually not published by the German press out of respect for the privacy of their surviving family members.
2.“‘ISIS Ambassador to Germany’ on Trial for Recruiting Jihadists,” Local De, September 26, 2017 and Georg Heil, “The Berlin Attack and the ‘Abu Walaa’ Islamic State Recruitment Network,” February, 2017, 10:2, Combatting Terrorism Center Sentinel, https://ctc.usma.edu/the-berlin-attack-and-the-abu-walaa-islamic-state-recruitment-network/.
3.Diehl and Lehberger, “Islamischer Staat.”
4.“The Capture of the 4th Regimental Base in Wilayat Shamal, Baghdad,” Dabiq, no. 9 , 29, May 2015.
5.Graeme Wood, The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State (New York: Random House, 2017).
6.Author’s interview with refugees from ISIS near Mosul, February 11, 2017.
7.Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Mariner Books, 2008), 343.
8.Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: Norton, 2005), 26.
9.Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (New York: Knopf, 2014), 412.
10.Karl Marx, Das Capital, 102–103.
11.Wood, The Way of the Strangers, 248.
12.Thomas Hegghammer, Jihadi Culture: The Art and Social Practices of Militant Islamicists (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
13.Mike Marguesee, “A Name That Lives in Infamy,” The Guardian Website, November 10, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/10/usa.iraq.
14.Harriet Crabtree, The Christian Life: Traditional Metaphors and Contemporary Theologies (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, Harvard Dissertations in Religion, 1991).
15.Arthur Wallis, Into Battle: A Manual of Christian Life (New York: Harper, 1973).
16.Hector Avalos, Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence (New York: Prometheus Books, 2005).
17.William McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015).
18.Wood, The Way of the Strangers, 264.
19.Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, 4th edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), chapter 8; Mark Juergensmeyer, “Cosmic War,” in John Barton, ed., Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, May 2016), http://religion.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-65.
20.Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, revised and expanded edition (1957; New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).
21.Meir Kahane, Listen World, Listen Jew (Jerusalem: Institute of the Jewish Idea, 1978), passim; Ehud Sprinzak, The Ascendance of Israel’s Radical Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
22.Perry Schmidt-Leukel, Religious Pluralism and Interreligious Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2017), 190–193.
23.Author’s interview with Abdul Aziz Rantisi, cofounder and political leader of Hamas, in Khan Yunis, Gaza, March 1, 1998.
24.Amarnath Amarasingam, “What Twitter Really Means for Islamic State Supporters,” War on the Rocks, December 30, 2015, https://warontherocks.com/2015/12/what-twitter-really-means-for-islamic-state-supporters/.