The Religion & Culture Web Forum

December 2006

War as Worship, Worship as War

By Michael Sells
John Henry Barrows Professor of Islamic History and Literature
University of Chicago Divinity School

Respondents:

Ahmed M. Rehab, Executive Director, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-Chicago)

Click here to read his abbreviated comments on the discussion board, or here for a full version in pdf form.

In the December issue, Michael Sells considers the case of Ali al-Timimi, an American, Virginia-based Islamic speaker and activist. Sells explores the role of text and interpretation, personal experience and cultural influence, in transforming Timimi from a youth who attended the bar mitzvahs of his Jewish classmates into a proponent of apocalyptic war.

Sells writes:

The text forms a draft of the first chapter of a book with the working title: Jihad and Crusade: Religion and Violence after the Cold War. It presents an example illustrating both the fixity and fluidity of militant paradigms. The purpose of the book is to examine how major paradigms within religions (including iconoclastic monotheism, purity, sacral war, sacrifice, martyrdom, sacred space, heaven and hell, and messianic apocalypticism) operate in the creation and hardening of conflict. During the formation of militancies, these paradigms collapse time around eternized polarities, based upon fixed, homogenous identities. The common factor in militant ideologies is the certitude and lack of ambiguity as to the contemporary identity of the protagonists and antagonists in the eternalized conflict.

Read the full essay
Read the invited commentary by Ahmed Rehab on the discussion board.

While no password is required to read the discussion board, each user must register with a personal user ID and password in order to be able to post a comment. Be sure to check out this month's invited commentary by clicking on the discussion board links throughout the Religion and Culture Web Forum site.

Web Forum Archive
Subscribe to be notified of new content

Please contact the Web Forum Editor with any comments or questions.