The Middle East is afflicted with more ethno-religious conflicts than any other region in the world. Extremist and jihadist groups pose unprecedented challenges, and atrocities are committed every day.
In an interview with Rudaw, American sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer says religious conflict and extremism points to a global problem: the failure of the secular nation-state in the era of globalization.
Juergensmeyer believes “a loss of faith in secular nationalism” is the root of ethno-religious conflicts in the world and that “religionization” of political conflicts has complicated many regional and global issues.
Juergensmeyer has written or edited over 20 books, including Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, and Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence. He is a professor of sociology and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Rudaw: Why are different forms of ethnic and religious violence erupting at this point of history? What’s religion have to do with it?
Mark Juergensmeyer: The answer to the first question has to do with the very fact that this is a global phenomenon that occurs all over the world in every religious tradition. This is the moment in the last 20 or 30 years where in every part of the world a new kind of strident political conservatism with religious and ethnic character has come to the fore.
We see it, of course, in the Middle East but it’s also true in India where the Hindu nationalist party the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has come to the power, and the Khalistan movement among the Sikhs.
Just two months ago, I was in Myanmar talking with Buddhist monks who were advocating violence against Muslims because they think that Burma should be an ethnically and religiously pure Burmese Buddhist country, and in Sri Lanka, a Sinhalese Buddhist country, the same kind of movement.
There are tensions in southern Thailand over issues of whether all of Thailand should be ethnically Buddhist or not. So, every country has suffering from this.
In my own country, the US, the rise of very strident right-wing politics in the Republican Party is complicating the political picture for both the party and [President Barack] Obama, having to deal with this kind of conservatism.
Similarly in Europe, of course, there is a kind of backlash against immigrant communities in France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands. In each of those countries, new political movements are supporting a right-wing that in some way is not on the political spectrum because it’s an ethno-religious sentiment diffused with nationalism.
So, it is happening all over the world.
Is it a sheer coincidence that it’s happening everywhere at the same time?
No, it seems to me there is fact that points to a global problem, and a global problem in the era of globalization, of course, is the weakening of the nation-state.
The secular nation-state, which is the proud accomplishment of the Enlightenment, came to the fore in Europe a couple hundred years ago and then, in the middle of the last century and at the end of colonialism, became a way for the whole of the world to be organized, as secular nation-states.
Later, the United Nation would be created as the forum for the entire world and the entire world consisted of the nation-states. There had to be nation-states because that’s the way the world was.
At the end of Ottoman Empire, as you know, from this part of the world countries were created over night. In the office of some British map-maker countries were created over here and there and the leftover was named Iraq.
It became almost humorous that nations could be created so capriciously but, once they were, they took on a life of their own and were often dominated by secular parties and dictators that were able to maintain power through most of traditional military means.
So, it’s no surprise that in a post-colonial era throughout the world - not only because of the unfinished project of anti-colonialism - what we see is a kind of casting off of the European notion of nationhood in many parts of the world. Even in European areas the notion of the nation is under the siege in the era of globalization.
In Europe itself, a transnational entity of the European Union has been created. The very birthplace of nationalism now has a transnational entity in order to represent itself because the nation-state is not sufficient. So, it’s a global phenomenon.
Why religions make up the core of this global phenomenon? As we have seen in recent years violent religious conflicts have profoundly afflicted the world.
The nation-state no longer has the same kind of power and secular nationalism as a sentiment no longer has the same coherence. But religion and ethnic nationalism does. 
The nation-state no longer has the same kind of power and secular nationalism as a sentiment no longer has the same coherence. But religion and ethnic nationalism does.
So in many ways the religionization or the ethnicization of nationalism gives a coherence that secular nationalism didn’t. It gives a new kind of identity. For this reason, it leads to a kind of ethnic cleansing in many parts of the world where the idea of nationalism now is being reclaimed in religious and ethnic terms, which means that minorities have the tough time.
Minorities don’t easily exist in this kind of ethnic society. This has in some ways become more of an issue now in this moment of globalization. You could see this developing even earlier.
For example, after the end of Ottoman Empire, we see an attempt to claim a Turkish identity. A kind of Turkish ethnic identity which made Turkey and the young Turks very harsh toward Armenians, Kurds and those people who didn’t fit in this new image of ethnic nationalism.
In recent years, it has become even more intense throughout the world in places like Myanmar and India. In India, history books are rewritten often to play down the influence of the great Mughal Empire and Muslims and try to claim more pure Hindu heritage and its historical tradition.
In the US, Christian extremists attempted to rewrite America’s history, claiming that America was founded to be a Christian nation. It wasn’t founded to be Christian nation. It was a secular enlightenment vision of what the country should be. But there is this attempt to reconceive and reimagining what a national identity is all about. That’s what religion has to with the issue.
We see lots of brutality being carried out in the name of religion. Do you believe the reason is inherent in religion? Do groups such as Islamic State and Boko Haram represent Islam?
Once I wrote in an article that religion is not the problem, but it’s problematic. No, I don’t think it’s a religious problem. This is a rise of a new form of political activism even though it claims to be very religious like the Islamic State. They are like any other political entity’s efforts to create power. They often are emerging in a power vacuum, in situation of contested or competing political interests.
These kinds of groups are like opportunistic infections in a body politic that is ravaged by internal problems. Clearly, these are attempts to assert power, to claim a new kind of representation. But religious language and tradition help to fortify that image. It helps to give it creditability in the minds of the people. It opens the door for the kind of true believers and extreme fanaticism to join the movement and often to be used sometimes in a very cynical way.
So religion has the potential to be used that way?
Exactly. Once I wrote in an article that religion is not the problem, but it’s problematic. When a struggle is perceived in religious terms it does create new problems for the conflict because it also creates a kind of absolutism and stridency that’s more difficult to deal with and it justifies those horrible acts.
Jihadists from different parts of the world joined together and are fighting against, as they say their “common enemy.” Do you believe Muslims share a collective identity?
No. No more than that I think there is united Christendom. I’m Christian, but the majority of the world’s Christians are not European or American. They are African or they are Latin American. If I’m in Nigeria, I can go to a Christian church and feel a certain familiar fellowship, but not in my wildest imagination do I think that the United State, which is a predominantly Christian nation - although certainly not exclusively - would ever join with Nigeria which is still a Christian majority nation. And Indonesia will not unite with Morocco just because they are both Muslim countries. This is not going to happen in either the Christian or in the Muslim world.
In your opinion groups such as Al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya in Egypt, Hamas in Palestine, Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Al-Qaeda in Pakistan are following a utopian goal of Muslim reunion (umma), or do they simply use religion to fulfill their local political ends?
Mostly the latter. These movements’ creations are related to the power vacuum and power struggles in those regions. Nigeria is quite different from Yemen, and Yemen is quite different from Afghanistan and so on.
These are different areas in the world and each of them has their own problems. The language they use is often quite similar and in the jihadi language there is kind of yearning for new umma; this expression is often similar. But, I think the reality is that they would not get along with each other, they would be very quickly fighting over whose umma, whose vision, is right and who should be the caliph - Baghdadi or somebody else.
Even within the jihadi movements Zawahiri and Al-Qaeda don’t think that Baghdadi is the caliph. This is also true within the other radical movements. There is great disagreement about who should be in charge, who should lead the umma. Even though the rhetoric might be the same, and maybe they even use the same names.
For example, there is ISIS now in Yemen, there is ISIS in Africa, but this is not really an organizational connection it’s simply an application of the name and the images for struggles that are very local.
But in your book, “Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State,” you talked about religious nationalism. Doesn’t that mean that there should be collective identity for such nationalism?
No. A part of that book that you referred talks about religious transnationalism as well as religious nationalism. And that’s a very interesting phenomenon. That is, of course, part of Al-Qaeda’s vision even more than ISIS. The ISIS is regional vision largely in Iraq and the Levant that uses some parts of Syria and Iraq as its main identity.
Al-Qaeda is more dramatic vision of a broader Islamic identity, that is never spelled out. No kind of governmental structure is offered for what this new Al-Qaeda vision of Islamic politic is going to be. But in Osama Bin-laden there is indirect reference to great Muslim Empires of the past, that maybe some similar kind could be established in the future, but it doesn’t go further than that.
It’s just a fantasy; part of a fuzzy notion that there might be an Islamic globalization that could counter the globalization that is largely economic and capitalist that is dominated by American and European powers. But it’s not spelled out in any kind of specific sense. That’s why ISIS has been much more influential, because it actually is directly linked to a specific place.
The ISIS created a union of Sunni Arabs in eastern Syria and western Iraq. They do share a common culture across the borders, so in that sense it’s not a transnational. I call it recreating of the lines of nationalism. The funny thing is in some ways it is kind of a logical ethnic-state, pulling a state from western Iraq and eastern Syria, and if you could do that without the horrible government of ISIS it might be viable state.
The same is true about eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan. The whole Pashtun area is divided; maybe there should have been a Pashtunistan. The border was again drawn by a British generals and some map offices in London.
So the neighboring countries ideally also should see an independent Kurdistan not as a threat but as part of their own solution to the issue. Beside the unwise division of the region by European powers, don’t you believe that this is the deadly combination of politics and religion that created more complications in the Middle East?
Yes, of course, but this is true throughout the world. It’s not just in this region but wherever the political competition is seen in religious terms. It often makes a much more tense kind of situation. A good example of that is the situation between Israel and Palestine.
This was not seen as religious struggle until very recently, until early 1990s. The PLO was a secular institution and Arafat was a secular leader. He was Muslim but not an extremist. So the struggle was over ethnic claims to territory; it was not a religious struggle until the time of Hamas. This was in part because of frustration; because the peace talks didn’t seem to be going very fast or very far.
This is also true on the Israeli side. Israel was founded to be secular country. The constitution is very secular. It doesn’t give any special privileges to Jews other than the right of return. But the Muslims and Christians within Israel are supposed to have equal rights as citizens. The very idea of calling Israel a Jewish state is fairly recent.
On both sides taking the conflict in religious terms, as struggle over religious images of the state, is very new. So, this religionization of the conflict emerged recently, it’s not an ancient problem. The reason why it’s new, in my opinion, is because of the failure of secular nation-state, and seeing the secular state as no longer having the capacity to deal with national consensuses.
Kurds have been the victimized because of ethnic conflict and recently religious extremists of ISIS. A solution that Kurdish nationalists have been striving for is building an independent state. Do you believe having an independent state would put an end to ethno-religious conflict for the Kurds?
Clearly a national identity provides a certain amount of security for groups that feel marginalized or disenfranchised. But it can lead to new problems among competing groups and interests, and problems for minorities in the region.
Look what has happened in Israel, which was created because Jews had been a victimized people in the World War II. So with the help of the European powers the state of Israel was created in the Middle East despite the fact that people were already living there.
The neighbors in the region were not very enthusiastic about a Jewish state being created in the middle of the Middle East, but it was. And, in turn, it does provide a certain amount of security for Jews. But it also, in many cases, makes it difficult for non-Jews to feel welcome in that homeland. It also creates tensions among Jews with different notions of what the state of Israel should be, both within and outside the country.
But that’s the danger with any state that is consciously created around ethnic and religious associations. One has to be vigilant against those kinds of extremes. I’m hopeful that the Kurdish community being itself multi-religious in its character, and its tradition to being open to people of variety of backgrounds, maybe because of this, they will not suffer of the same extreme fate if a separate Kurdistan is given official sanction.
Given the complexity of the case, you have to be sensitive to the concerns of all parties, and ideally have the complicity and cooperation of Turkey, Iran and Iraq - countries that have vital interests in this new entity. They should be part of the process.
An interesting model in this regard is the case of is Northern Ireland. The UK and Ireland are both partners in supporting Northern Ireland as a new entity, not fighting it. So the neighboring countries ideally also should see an independent Kurdistan not as a threat but as part of their own solution to the issue.
