10.9

• Transnational religion


  Religion going global
• Transnational religion


  • Emerged through the post-World War II
  • Blends of religious universalism and local particularism
• Religious universalism gains the upper hand


  Religion becomes the central reference for immigrants
• Local ethnic or national particularism gains or maintains the most important place


  For local immigrant communities
• Role of religion

  • Provides a sense of identity
  • Provides traditional religious leadership and a sense of accountability
  • Offers a sense of security
• No one in the secular world could have predicted that the first confrontations of the 21st century would involve religion - secularism's old, long banished foe
• The ideals and ideas of activists like Osama Bin Laden are authentically and thoroughly religious
• Authority of religion

  • Gave bin Laden's cadres the moral legitimacy of employing violence
  • Provided the metaphor of cosmic war, an image of spiritual struggle
• The World Trade Center assault and many other recent acts of religious terrorism have no obvious military goal, but are meant to make a powerful impact on the public consciousness and provide strong claims of moral justification
• It is not so much that religion has become politicized, but that politics have become "religionized"
• Religion-driven conflicts


  • September 11 attacks
  • Marawi Siege
• The September 11 attack and many other recent acts of religious terrorism are skirmishes in what their perpetrators conceive to be a "global war"
• The choices of targets have often been transnational, with the World Trade Center employees killed in the September 11 assault being citizens of 86 nations
• The network of perpetrators was also transnational, consisting of members from various nationalities
• The incident was global in its impact, in large part because of the worldwide and instantaneous coverage of transnational news media
• Terrorism


  • A public performance of violence as a social event that has both real and symbolic aspects
  • Signaled alternative views of public reality: not just a single society in transition, but a world challenged by strident religious visions of transforming change
• Violent religious movements


  • Reject the compromises with liberal values and secular institutions that most mainstream religion has made
  • Refuse to observe the boundaries that secular society has set around religion, keeping it private rather than allowing it to intrude into public spaces
  • Try to create a new form of religiosity that rejects what they regard as weak modern substitutes for the more vibrant and demanding forms of religion that they imagine to be essential to their religion's origins
• Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)

  • Started as an al Qaeda splinter group
  • Conducted approximately 40 suicide bombings per month in Iraq in 2013
  • Announced the formation of a caliphate stretching from Aleppo in Syria to Diyala in Iraq in 2014
  • Suffered key losses along Syria's border with Turkey by the end of 2015
  • Expanded into a network of affiliates in at least eight other countries by 2015
  • Lost 95% of its territory, including Mosul and Raqqa, by December 2017