Fuzzy but fascinating


The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence Andrew R. Murphy (ed.)


WILEY-BLACKWELL, 615PP, £110 ■Tablet bookshop price £99


“collect the most recent scholarship and knowledge about world religions”, presented in “newly commissioned essays by distinguished authors in the field” … “in a style which is accessible to undergraduate students, as well as scholars and the interested general reader”. The authors are to approach the subject “in a creative and forward-thinking style …” If this sounds straightforward, consider


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the likelihood that the intrepid editor of this particular number in the series, upon accepting the assignment, must have immediately found himself drowning in ironic “scare quotes” as he tried to identify – and recruit – an encyclopedia’s worth of “distinguished authors” in the “field” of “religion and violence”. Given the virtually impossible nature of this assignment, it is hardly surprising that Andrew Murphy chose not to impose on his authors a working definition of “religion” or “violence” to lend thematic coherence to the 45 essays commissioned for this volume. More curiously, perhaps, he did choose to frame the discussion with two opening definitional essays that question the validity of the very concept “religious violence”, one of which (penned by the momentarily irrepressible theologian William Cavanaugh) also calls into question the validity of the concept of religion itself. Presumably, this is an attempt to meet the “forward-thinking” criterion, but it has the effect of allowing, if not 1,000 flowers to bloom in these 600 pages, approximately 35 different species – and also about 10 weeds.


Keeping the terms of engagement fuzzy is


not Murphy’s only questionable editorial decision. Inadvertently acknowledging the fact that the number of “distinguished scholars” who have made “religion and violence” their primary area of study is less than 45, he expands the scope of the collection from “religion and violence” to the “broader and more subtle interconnections between religion, nationalism, ethnicity, race, politics, gender and economics … ”. This strategy, he decided, would lead to “a more subtle and complex and (quite frankly), a more interesting reality”. Unfortunately for me and for Professor


Murphy, I am of the camp who thinks (quite frankly) that there is something called religion, that some of the world’s violence can properly be called “religious”, and that these phenomena – religion and religious violence – are sufficiently


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he stated purpose of the Blackwell Companions to Religion series is to


interesting in and of themselves. Yes, religion is a modern and Western “construct” – much the same way that the nation, gender, race, ethnicity and those other “more interesting” identity markers are modern, Western constructs. The reality, however, is that over the past 300 years religion – like nationalism and so on – has migrated beyond its Western site of origins to become a pervasive, global player. Moreover, some people torture, shoot, behead, bomb and bludgeon other people in the conviction that doing so somehow satisfies a religious or religiously derived duty. The fact that the modern nation-state also legitimates and enacts deadly violence, on a scale far greater and ultimately more destructive, does not render the category “religious violence” meaningless. Nor is all violence alike, in either its timing, targets or consequences. Motivations matter, and a significant if relatively tiny minority of the modern world’s Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and indigenous religious groups have been motivated by interpretations of their respective religious traditions that obligate them to commit or legitimate deadly violence against others. These claims are empirically grounded, and thus could have served as a modest platform for a huge and useful volume dedicated to analysing and explaining the hundreds of modern (primarily nineteenth- and twentieth-century) cases of actual religious violence. The primary obligation of any critic,


however, is to review the book before you, not the one you would have written, or would have wished to see written. And what Professor Murphy and colleagues have produced, instead, is an enormously informative and often fascinating tour of several horizons. If conceptual precision is not available, one adjusts and enjoys the eclectic and erudite.


Limiting the volume to its putative topic would have arguably eliminated several otherwise worthy chapters, such as those on Confucian ethical action, fascist violence, the Spanish-American War, Puritanism, and the persecution of Aborigines in Australia. Moreover, a case can be made that stretching and challenging the categories of analysis is an effective way of testing and refining them. Was Stalinism in any sense a “religion?” Can we speak of


1 October 2011 | THE TABLET | 25


Iraqis mourn at the coffin of Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim in Karbala, Iraq, in 2003. The Shiite cleric was assassinated when a bomb exploded outside a mosque in Najaf, killing more than 80 people. Photo: CNS


structural and cultural violence as the goal of religiously sanctioned legal regimes that discriminate against women in India, or Iran? What is the relationship between the


“symbolic violence” produced by Tantric Buddhism and militant forms of Buddhist nationalism?


Across the volume such theoretical questions are addressed unsystematically or not at all. ’Tis a pity. Nevertheless, a curious and voracious reader of the (mostly accessible) essays found in The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence will learn a great deal about religion in its various cultural, economic, political and social manifestations, especially as these are related to violence. Indeed, so overwhelming and fascinating are the details about religion on display in these pages, that one would begin to think that it actually exists. Scott Appleby


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