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Religion is part of the solution

Jocelyne Cesari, Professor of Religion and Politics, University of Birmingham, Senior Research Fellow

at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, Georgetown University

hen, in 1935, Joseph Stalin asked: “How

many divisions?” to gauge the relevance of

the Vatican on the international scene, he

pretty much encapsulated the disdain of state rulers of

the time regarding religion as a significant component

of world affairs. Neither good nor bad, religion did not

matter. There were several reasons for this neglect, such

as the building of the international community after the

Wesphalian treaty of 1648 as a club of rational state

actors acting primarily on material and security inter-

ests – although reality may not always have complied

with this dominant perception.

Nevertheless, the end of the cold war and the emergence

of political groups which are religiously motivated, most

notoriously Al Qaeda and now ISIS, has dramatically

changed this perception. It has been the work of Samuel

Huntington, first presented in a 1993 article in Foreign

Affairs and subsequently elaborated in a 1996 book, which

has dominated the discourse on culture as an element in

international conflicts. Huntington argues that Islam is

uniquely incompatible with and antagonistic to the core

values of the West (such as equality and modernity). This

argument resurfaces in most current analyses of interna-

tional affairs and globalization, notably in terrorist studies

since 9/11. However, as abundantly proven by the social

sciences, civilizations are not homogenous, monolithic

players in world politics with an inclination to ‘clash’,

but rather consist of pluralistic, divergent and convergent

actors and practices that are constantly evolving.

Thus,

the ‘clash of civilizations’ fails to address not only conflict

between civilizations but also conflict and differences

within civilizations. In particular, evidence does not exist

to substantiate Huntington’s prediction that countries with

similar cultures are coming together, while countries with

different cultures are coming apart.

In all these analyses, the answer provided to the ques-

tion, “Why do they hate us?” rarely takes the wider context

of competition for political influence, regional dynamics

and historical sequences into account. Rather, it is almost

always based on discussion of textual and ideological use

of religious references by Muslim actors.

The cultural divide is thus envisaged as the primary cause

of international crises. Admittedly, the ‘Huntingtonian’

position is based on a premise that cannot be simply

dismissed: that identity and culture play a decisive role in

international relations. But what culture and what Islam

are being spoken of here? The idea of a monolithic Islam

leads to a reductionism in which the conflicts in Sudan,

Lebanon, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan are imagined to

stem collectively and wholly from the domain of religion.

It is, moreover, ironic that the role of religion, so long

ignored or neglected in terms of international politics, is

now exaggerated and decontextualized in an ahistorical

perspective, which has elicited its fair share of criticism

from scholars of Islamic cultures.

Seen in this light, the clash of civilizations is an attempt,

albeit a consistently inadequate one, to shift international

politics away from an exclusively nation-state-centric

approach, only to immediately recreate and legitimate the

view of a fixed world of cultural agents participating in

predetermined conflicts of interest. This is to say that any

attempt at an analysis of culture and global cultural conflict

To overcome essentialization, it is important not to reduce religion

to beliefs or texts

Image: Berkley Center

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