Talking Terror with Academic Religionists

The best advice may be: don't. We often get questions like "How Islamic is ISIS?", "Isn't al-Qa'īda taking its program from the Qur'ān?", "But, I thought Islam was essentially a peace-loving religion?". These have so many problematic premises, and the stakes for any answer to be hugely misinterpreted are very high.

One way to deal with commonplace but problematic questions is to ask a different question. "How do the norms of a lived tradition develop, from what sources and with what ideas of authority?", "How do new religious movements relate to modern and premodern political contexts?", "What fascinates and terrifies Western liberals about the idea of religious killing when there are so many other kinds of violence in a world that empowers people like them?".

These kinds of questions are professional scholars' questions as opposed to those of informed and concerned students. These are the important questions.

However, they don't engage with the basic curiosity presented, and answering a question with another question may be research method, but it is not always the best practice for all pedagogical situations. 

Maybe there can be a propadeutic answer: an answer that suffices for a particular moment that later needs development into something more meaningful and complex. We think of these in our grade-school contexts. We hear more and more that simplifications are "lies our teachers told us", and their ideological content could do with criticism. But before we slander our colleagues as deceitful, let's consider what we could say as propadeutic:

They ask: "Did Columbus discover America?"

We think: Well kids, "discovered" is a very problematic concept. What does it mean in the context of the settlement of indigenous peoples, whom we're not sure quite where they were coming from and how? What does "discovery" mean in the context of a time not as obsessed with origins in the ways we are? What about those Vikings? 

But couldn't we say: "Columbus was the start of Europeans coming here to stay."

Or

They ask: "Did Lincoln free the slaves?" 

We think: Well, kids Lincoln campaigned on it sometimes, promised not to, then he did but only in the conquered states, and how emancipation ended up working, much of the structures of forced labor remained in place and even intensified through to the 20th century. 

But couldn't we say: "Lincoln was the most important person in freeing the slaves."

It's easy to think of these, but of course, religion-terrorism propadeutics can't be so simple because they're not generally questions about facts. These kinds of questions come up in college, or at least, that's where we're dealing with them.

As such, they should be about giving students a basis to critically engage the modern grammar of ideas leading to actions, of modern possibilities and modern interpretations.

So, with that, let me, a fourth-year grad student, end the debate about teaching religion and terror/war and come up with a definitive formula to give any and all students they will later come to appreciate!

*Perhaps not, but hopefully we teachers can take the conversation in new directions:

They ask: "Does violence come from religion?"

We think: That's the wrong question for many reasons.

But couldn't we say: "Modern people tend to think that people acquire or develop ideas that are in turn responsible for actions. When we are troubled by actions, we tend to ask back about the ideas that caused them and back further about whether and how those ideas reflect "natural" or "scriptural" or another kind of reality.

"However, to ask about motivating ideas in academic religious studies is more concerned with ideas of ethics, that is of giving account for actions. When it is religion invoked in violence, we should ask critically about how such accounts are shaped by ideas and forms of devotion in the context of the traditions in which they are lived and the structures in which they are situated."

The idea isn't that it settles a question, but points to how further questions might develop. To make sense in this saturated discourse on religion and violence, a propadeutic answer like this one or another one can't suffice, but sometimes it has to do.