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Religion and the harmony business: after 9/11, more is less

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Abstract

A focus on interfaith dialogue, while in itself not a bad thing, often is weaponized as an ahistorical maneuver detracting from root causes, historical injustices, material conditions, and concrete grievances. The violence of 9/11 and its aftermath is not a function of religious illiteracy or intolerance (though these do not help), but colonial, orientalist, neocolonial, and opportunistic geopolitics (as well as religious illiteracy). This obscuring generates wrong policies, which only function to further securitize and racialize (religious) communities without redressing root causes of grievances and without taking responsibility. My argument is that under the guise of more religion, the mechanisms of the global engagement with religion actually contribute to less religious literacy, to hermeneutically uncritical accounts of religiosity, and to the propping up of generic (and unelected) religious authorities, including technocrats who specialize in “religious engagement.” This argument is based on my empirical research in Kenya, the Philippines, and Bosnia, where I examined various sites of “engagement with religion.” Focusing here primarily on the case of Bosnia as it relates to the global post 9/11 industry of “engagement with religion,” I ask how and why the practices of religion and peacebuilding/development both reinforce and exceed global structural, neocolonial, and epistemic forms of violence. What I call the “harmony business” (or the business of engaging with “good” religion) focuses much more on function or doing religion/being religious as a matter of communal boundaries rather than on content or knowing religious traditions as living and contested sites of interpretation and reimagining.

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Notes

  1. For an overview of the state of the art, see Omer (2021).

  2. The concept of “soft power” was coined in Nye (2004). In the burgeoning field of religion as soft power, see Mandaville and Shadi Hamid (2018).

  3. See, for example, Wilson (2021); Mandaville (2017).

  4. For this focus on “responsibilizing” as central to neoliberal rationality and its dedemocratizing force, see Brown (2019).

  5. See, for an example of a critique of this operative binary (Shakman-Hurd 2015, p. 22–36).

  6. For example, one of the key ethnographic works on Indigenous Peoples in Mindanao deploys Habermas as a key theoretical tool to understanding their experiences. See Gaspar (2011).

  7. For example, see Wood (2015).

  8. A version of this section on religious literacy and my exposition of Moore’s approach also appears in (Omer 2023).

  9. Moore is also one of the main authors of the definition of “religious literacy” adopted by the American Academy of Religion, which is almost verbatim of her earlier articulations in this essay. See American Academy of Religion (n.d.)

  10. This is precisely where Diane L. Moore’s intervention in the literature on religious literacy is important in deflating the prioritization of “sincerity.” See Moore (2017).

  11. Epistemic community according to Haas (1992, p. 2) is “a network of professionals with recognised expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy relevant knowledge within that domain or issue-area.”.

  12. For a related analysis, see Omer (2020).

  13. As the Algerian French activist Houria Bouteldja highlights about her life in France, “I am not from here; I am not from here. It is fate that has brought me here. I hope that the tortures of exile will have been worthwhile. A long flute, a long flute has wounded my heart and my soul.” See Bouteldja (2016, p. 107).

  14. The Kenyan government launched an extensive Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) or Counter Terrorism (CT) campaign in an effort to tackle—through the counterterrorism work of the government, civil society, and the private sector—the growing numbers of domestic al-Shabaab militants and ISIS sympathizers, devising strategies for “de-radicalization.” The chief strategists of the Kenya-based CVE program sought out Israeli training and assistance. The role of Israeli apparatuses and key officials in various loci of CVE may be counterproductive in its disregard for the discursive layers of violence and the symbolic space that Palestine plays in the Islamist imagination.

  15. Interview by author with a key interlocutor in the Mosque Family Resource Center in Nairobi, July 2019.

  16. The Tony Blair Foundation itself exemplifies some of the issues I have highlighted as problematic with respect to the doing religion sphere, not the least of which is Blair’s own legacy regarding the crime of invading Iraq.

  17. It can be accessed at https://ifyc.org/interfaith.

  18. A wave of evidence-based reports issued by respectable human rights organizations including the Israeli B’tselem and Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch shows explicitly why Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid in the entire geopolitical space (albeit through a differentiated mechanisms) from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea.

  19. This is an allusion to the work of Vamik D. Volkan on “chosen traumas” and its intergenerational transmission, which the interviewee read as part of her curriculum. See, for example Volkan (2001).

  20. Participant in a focus group, Sarajevo, April 2018.

  21. This is a pseudonym to protect the interlocutor’s confidentiality.

  22. The war itself lasted from 1992 to 1995.

  23. Interview, April 2018.

  24. Participant in a focus group, Sarajevo, April 2018.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Ibid.

  28. A focus group I conducted in a community outside Sarajevo in April 2018 with actors from different religious and communal locations resonated with what I heard from similar interreligious and intercommunal participants in programmatic efforts in Mindanao and Kenya. They spoke about how, for example, youth sporting events can help to build relationships across otherwise extremely segregated spaces, including schools.

  29. Interview, April 2018.

  30. Ibid.

  31. For important analyses of the war and the mobilization of religion and ethnoreligion therein, see Mojzes (2011).

  32. Interview, Sarajevo 2018.

  33. For a gender-sensitive analysis of this ongoing war’s logic, see Spahić Šiljak 2014a.

  34. Even if peace and reconciliation work within a civil society that does not explicitly foreground religion as a mechanism, the segregationist logic determines the discourse. For important research that highlights specifically religious women’s reconciliation work in Bosnia and Herzegovina within civil society organizational spaces; see also Spahić Šiljak 2014b.

  35. The case of Mostar was introduced by multiple interlocutors I met in Bosnia as a challenge to an otherwise enduring focus on reconciliation. Further, even if an industry of religion and peace has consolidated its local manifestation in Bosnia, the legacy of religion and peace therein is ambivalent; see, for example Clark (2010) and Stuebner (2009).

  36. Interview, Sarajevo, April 2018.

  37. See Arendt (1958, p. 206 and 223). Likely influenced by Arendt, Foucault used the concept of the “boomerang” in his lecture series delivered in Paris in 1976. He said that “while colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself” (Foucault 2003, p. 103). Foucault’s analysis of the boomerang effect relates intricately to his influential concept of “biopolitics,” the control over life. For reflections and analyses regarding the complex relation between the metropolitan centers and the colonies and between nations and empire, see Burton (2003).

  38. The boomeranging and cross-referencing are evident in the contemporary moment, where social justice movements such as the Movement for Black Lives in the U.S. identify how the militarization of police forces in urban centers results from cross-learning from militaries in charge of massive colonial occupations, such as the Israeli Defense Forces.

  39. Indeed, internal colonization often takes spatial forms through city planning and zoning. This is part and parcel of the “boomerang effect.” See Dikeҫ (2007).

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  1. The University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, USA

    Atalia Omer

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Omer, A. Religion and the harmony business: after 9/11, more is less. Z Religion Ges Polit 7, 765–786 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41682-023-00153-4

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