عنوان

Challenging the Curious Erasure of Religion from the Study of Religious Terrorism

LA122879

انگلیسی

Challenging the Curious Erasure of Religion from the Study of Religious Terrorism

[Article]

Lorne L. Dawson

Leiden

Brill

The role that religion plays in the motivation of "religious terrorism" is the subject of much ongoing dispute, even in the case of jihadist groups. Some scholars, for differing reasons, deny that it has any role; others acknowledge the religious character of jihadism in particular, but subtly discount the role of religion, while favoring other explanations for this form of terrorism. Extending an argument begun elsewhere (Dawson 2014, 2017), this article delineates and criticizes the influence of a normative religious bias, on the one hand, and a normative secular bias, on the other hand, on scholarship addressing the relationship between religiosity and terrorism. I examine two illustrative studies to demonstrate the complexity of the conceptual issues at stake: Karen Armstrong's best-selling book Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014) and a recent article by Bart Schuurman and John G. Horgan on the rationales for terrorist violence in homegrown jihadist groups (2016).

2018

141-164

Numen

65/2-3

1568-5276

Comparative Religion & Religious Studies

explaining terrorism

General

History of Religion

jihadism

Religion & Society

Religion in Antiquity

Religious Studies

religious terrorism

Social Sciences

terrorist motivations

Lorne L. Dawson

10.1163/15685276-12341492

p

[Article]

275578

a

Y