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Towards an Intercultural Hermeneutics of Post-’9/11’ Reconciliation Comments on Richard Kearney’s ‘Thinking After Terror: An Interreligious Challenge chair of intercultural philosophy,
Erasmus University Rotterdam; and Theme Group on Agency,
African Studies Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands |
paper
in press in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Crossroads,
Vol. 2, No. 1 (April, 2005).
©
2005 Wim van Binsbergen
Working at the
forefront of hermeneutical philosophy, widely known, inter
alia, as mediator in seminal round tables on the gift and on
forgiveness around Derrida and Marion, and combining a
professorial position in Ireland with one in Boston, U.S.A.,
Professor Kearney is particularly well situated to reflect on the
way out from the aporia generated by the attack on various
locations on the eastern U.S.A. seaboard on 11 September 2001,
commonly known as ‘9/11’. With the article under
discussion here (Kearney 2005), he does so in a journal published
in South Asia yet electronically circulating world-wide, which
adds another element of potentially global relevance to his
argument. However, for such potential to materialise, a number of
further conditions need to be fulfilled:
1.
the attempt to adopt a truly global perspective;
2.
the avoidance, therefore, of parochial myopias of a
denominational and geopolitical nature;
3.
and closer reflection on the practical mechanisms of
reconciliation.
My comments
explore how these themes may illuminate and render even more
effective Richard Kearney’s thoughtful and sympathetic
argument.
Early in his argument, our author takes for granted that
‘9/11’ is to have an effect on inter-religious
dialogue. But why should this be so? Must we assume that
‘9/11’ was part of a primarily religious
conflictive interaction? The victims cannot all be taken to have
been Christians, or even religious people, at all. The same holds
for the U.S.A. at large, to which the victims largely belonged.
And although the perpetrators may have justified their deeds in
terms of their particular version of Islam, they did not in the
least act with the mandate of all, or most, Muslims in the
present world. I doubt whether ‘9/11’ can be
legitimately construed to constitute a religious event.
And if it cannot, what then is the place of religion in this
context of a non-religious event? What is it in religions that
suggests they have a role to play in the aftermath of events like
‘9/11’? Kearney sees the problem (for he speaks of misappropriation
of religion, implying that this is what the perpetrators were
guilty of in addition to their heinous physical violence and the
violation of common human combative codes), but does not offer an
answer.
With rather a poetical or homiletic turn that is not supported by
explicit discursive reasoning either, Kearney suggests that the
perpetrators’ misappropriation of religion ought to be
countered by a corresponding re-appropriation of non-violence
among the other camp – loosely but significantly identified
as ‘us’, ‘we’. But who is re-appropriating
what, here? The vision of non-violence has formed a widespread
code governing intimate face-to-face relations in the sphere of
kinship and co-residence in the majority of human societies
throughout known human history (cf. van Binsbergen 2001a), –
long before it became a precept for the relations between non-kin
and strangers, in the wider public space, in formal codes of law,
ethical philosophies, and world religions. The vision of
non-violence is nobody’s and everybody’s property. It
calls for application, re-dedication, revival, rather than
re-appropriation.
However, the operative word here is ‘we’, rather than
‘non-violence’. If such re-dedication to non-violence,
also in the public sphere, even in intercultural, interethnic,
interreligious and intercontinental relations, is to provide
‘the solution’ to the ‘9/11’ aftermath, as
Kearney suggests, this presupposes that there is one and only one
problem: that there is a unanimous set of people (the
unidentified ‘we’ featuring in Kearney’s argument)
who are evaluating the events of ‘9/11’ (and the chain
of events leading up to and following the ‘9/11’ drama)
from a shared perspective, groping for one interpretation common
to them all. However, the fundamental fact to face in the context
of ‘9/11’ is that there are a number (at least two,
probably several more) of distinct positions, from which very
different evaluations will be attached to recent intercontinental
history, including ‘9/11’.
When – as in the case of ‘ 9/11’ – a small
set of humans are brought to violate widespread and fundamental
codes such as the respect for human lives, for civilians, for the
latter’s beloved ones, for other people’s property and
the fruits of human labour (in the form of buildings and
airplanes), for the orderly conduct of armed conflict, and even
turn out to be prepared to sacrifice their own lives in the
process, then, in principle, the whole of humanity qualifies as
victims – materially, by association, vicariously, and by
implication; and this even includes the perpetrators themselves,
whose sense of historical injury and dehumanising hatred we, the
other humans, can only begin to fathom inside ourselves. This
implies the possibility of a ‘we’ that encompasses the
whole of mankind, and that contains in itself the conditions for
all suffering and for all reconciliation.
Yet, unmistakably, Kearney’s ‘we’ means mainly
‘U.S.A. citizens and others identifying with them’,
including himself. Admittedly, and somewhat courageously if
considered from a mainstream U.S.A. standpoint, he qualifies the
‘we’ perspective in several ways: it should not imply
condoning the torture of Iraqi and Guantanamo Bay prisoners; it
should not imply the mutual demonisation in which not only the
perpetrators but also the U.S.A. leadership have publicly
engaged; it should combine a Christian inspiration with a
Buddhist, Hinduist, and Graeco-Roman classical one, and even have
some room for Muslim mysticism; it should not be entrapped in a
naïve ‘we’/’them’ dichotomy; it should not
fall into the Huntington (1996) trap of conceptualising the
conflict in terms of a clash of civilisations (but neither
overstress pardon at the expense of justice, i.e. trial and
punishment). Yet despite all these qualifications, the
‘we’ in Kearney’s argument remains a North
Atlantic ‘we’ that is loyal to U.S.A. concerns. It does
not shun from criticism of the U.S.A. leadership, it does
acknowledge the existence (but scarcely the contents) of a highly
critical assessment of the U.S.A. performance like Virilio’s
(2002), yet carefully matches such criticism with ample attention
for no-nonsense patriotic statements of such hawks as Dooley and
Hitchens, who are cited in (apparent?) approval. Even for an
Irish intellectual there are, apparently, limits to what one can
write if one has a part-time professorship at Boston, which is
from whose airport the ‘9/11’ airplanes took off on
their way to destruction.
However, given his practical commitment to U.S.A. society Kearney
probably needs to wrap up his unmistakable criticism in this way.
He needs to create a context of mainstream credibility in which
he can yet pose his question ‘How do we even begin to
imagine pardoning Bin Laden?’ without immediately
disqualifying this question as rhetorical, as implying ‘such
pardon is impossible to imagine under whatever
circumstances’.
Kearney claims that inhabitants of the North Atlantic (or rather,
by implication, their intellectual, journalistic and political
spokespersons) tend to look at contemporary wars ‘uniquely
in terms of politics, economics and sociology’. Again he
skips one step, failing to argue why sudden violent attacks on
civil targets, without prior declaration of war and without being
immediately claimed by a particular nation or political movement,
qualify as ‘war’.[1] Somewhat uncritically,
he adopts the naïve definition of the situation as offered by
the U.S.A. leadership, in terms of ‘War of Terror’.
Probably Kearney’s hermeneutical position is primarily
responsible for his seeing ‘9/11’, legitimately, as a
religious event: he is merely representing the protagonists’
own views of the matter. The demonising idioms, the emotional
repertoire of images, employed by the leadership on both sides
suggest that one is not dealing here with a secular conflict but
with one saturated with religious overtones, on both sides.
‘Axis of Evil’ (in the idiom employed by the U.S.A.
leadership) is not a secular but a religious term. Yet I suggest
we must go beyond what Kearney advocates: we must not only
discover the religious imagery here which we may at first have
risked to ignore, – we must also analyze that religious
imagery and see what implications it has for understanding,
controlling, and resolving this intercontinental conflict that
has already claimed many thousands of lives and that threatens to
endanger world peace for decades to come. The gain of empathy and
representation inherent in the hermeneutical position, may also
be its loss: it allows us the identification and exegesis of the
protagonists’ public pronouncements, but does not allow us
to speak of their hidden or dissimilated agenda’s, let alone
to analyse, distantly and objectifyingly, the political economy
and other structural constraints to which the protagonists may be
argued to be subjected even without them consciously, explicitly
realising so – or without us having evidence that they do.
In terms of an established usage in cultural anthropology (cf.
Headland et al. 1990), hermeneutics allows us an emic
analysis but not an etic one. The dilemma also reminds us
of the classic Gadamer/Habermas debate of the 1960s-1970s –
of which Ricoeur has been a major commentator. If, complementary
to a hermeneutical perspective, we would feel free to adopt a
distancing analytical perspective, we would ask ourselves whether
the ‘9/11’ confrontation between the (dominant elites
of the) North Atlantic region and the world of militant Islam, in
addition to the emic religious overtones, is not also a rational
conflict over scarce resources in the political and economic
domain (on the U.S.A. side: solidarity with Israel, a new phase
of geopolitical expansion into the Middle East, and reliance
– for industry and for highly-valued individual mobility
– on cheap mineral oil; on the side of the militant
Islamists: acknowledgment of historical wrongs done to Muslims in
recent global history, and recognition of the validity of the
view that Islam as a path through modernity and globalisation
offers a valid alternative to dominant North Atlantic patterns).
Such an analytical perspective would do something very important
that is utterly beyond the hermeneutical approach: it would allow
us to view ‘9/11’ in terms of global hegemony and
counter-hegemony. In more practical terms, it would make it
possible to contemplate the extent to which the U.S.A. leadership
themselves may have been partly responsible for the escalation
leading to ‘9/11’, so that the firm rhetorical
distinction between perpetrators and victims begins to dissolve,
and one obvious (if only partial) way out after ‘9/11’
would become discernable: trying to undo, on both sides,
the conditions that led to such escalation.
If Kearney insists on the religious dimension yet takes his
distance from Huntington, this makes sense. For Kearney the fact
that the ‘9/11’ conflict has profound religious
aspects, means not that it is unsolvable (Huntington), but, quite
to the contrary, enables Kearney to point at the potential of
religion to cross or overcome boundaries and to move towards
reconciliation. In that respect his approach is far more
sympathetic than Huntington’s. Yet it is similarly myopic in
failing to explore – given the non-religious aspects of the
conflict I have just indicated –non-religious roads to
conflict resolution. Remarkably, Kearney insists – and this
makes up most of his article – that religion has a great
conflict-resolving potential, but
1.
without offering an explicit argument as to why this should be so
– and
2.
while apparently glossing over the contradiction that both
parties in the ‘9/11’ conflict articulate only their
irreconcilable enmity, but not their preparedness towards
reconciliation, in terms of the world religion they respectively
adhere to. It is as if Kearney is saying:
‘you who are
casting your post-’’9-11’’ enmity in a
religious idiom, and who are capitalising on the perennial
association between religion and violence,[2] please
realise that the same idiom contains such elements as would allow
you to overcome your enmity – and, incidentally, the same
elements also appear in other religions and worldviews, e.g. in
those of South Asia’.
This is profoundly meaningful, yet two crucial conditions
continue to inform the situation and render Kearney’s
recommendations rather ineffective:
1.
The overall appeal to wisdom traditions’ hermeneutical
tolerance fails to identify the specific social, political and
communicative conditions under which the parties involved may
reject, or may be prepared to adopt, the proposed shift from a
conflictive and boundary-emphasising to a boundary-crossing and
reconciliatory selection from among the repertoire of their
respective religion, as exponents of the long history of
wisdom traditions in the world. Kearney’s strategy in his
argument – even though it is published in a South Asian
venue – is to address those in the North Atlantic with
Christian, Buddhist and Hinduist identifications or sympathies,
and show them – with considerable erudition and eloquence
– how here a road to hermeneutic tolerance may be found
which would allow them (‘us’) to forgive the
perpetrators (but see above) of ‘9/11’. It is somewhat
unfortunate that Kearney’s hermeneutical perspective does
not extend beyond the dominant groups in the North Atlantic
region, especially not to Muslims in general (including those
many millions of Muslims currently residing in the North
Atlantic), let alone the militant Islamists behind the
‘9/11’ attacks. Only towards the end of his argument
there is a passing admittance that also Islamic spirituality
provides examples of the hermeneutic tolerance that Kearney
advocates as the way out. His argument would have been much more
impressive if he would have explicitly addressed the crucial
question as to what kind of perspective (religious, political,
economic) one would have to offer to Muslims, and to militant
Islamists particularly, in order to bring them to the point where
reconciliation becomes possible and past deeds may be brought to
redressive and reintegrative trial in mutual recognition of their
unacceptability. Moreover, it would have been an impressive
display of intercultural sensitivity if Kearney had acknowledged
traditions of reconciliation world-wide, including those outside
the established literate world religions, e.g. in the African and
Native American context.[3] Kearney’s plea to
let the world’s wisdom traditions do the work of
reconciliation would have been much more effective, and
convincing, if this plea had not stressed the North Atlantic
region, philosophical and Christian/ theological tradition so
ethnocentrically – which is where his short excursion into
South Asian wisdom traditions soon takes Kearney. If he mentions
mysticism, why miss the golden opportunity of exploring Islamic
mysticism (al-DJili, ibn al-‘Arabi, al-Hallaj, al-GHazzali,
etc.) as a possible source of a wisdom that could well be
persuasive to militant Islamists. If he mentions Aristotle, why
not exploit the fact that Aristotle was transmitted to the North
Atlantic through Islamic thinkers and left traces in Islamic
thought even after al-Ghazzali had concluded the victory of
theology over philosophy, in the world of Islam? The existence of
an extensive and enduring Islamic wisdom tradition (Sufism,
associated with its exponents’ woollen – Arab. suf
– garments according to some popular etymology, but in fact
the pursuit of (Greek) sophia, ‘wisdom’) is
largely ignored by Kearney. This is all the more regrettable,
because Sufism, much more than the formal conceptual and
confrontational thought of militant Islamism, has been the
popular Islam of the Middle Eastern and North African masses for
almost a millennium now.[4]
2.
The public underpinning of either side’s
post-’9/11’ position by reference to a religious idiom
may be only a minority option. Kearney seems to preach for
his own parish, which not only is limited to dominant groups in
the North Atlantic region, but among the latter, to those with a
Christian or South Asian religious identity or at least sympathy.
Given high levels of secularisation, the set thus defined only
comprises a minority of the current population of the North
Atlantic region. How are the secularised others to be involved,[5]
including those who prefer to see the Christian idiom employed by
the U.S.A. leadership as mere rhetoric? How are Muslims to be
involved, without first being blackmailed into having to publicly
denounce the militant Islamists and the, admittedly totally
unacceptable, extremes to which the latter went in the context of
‘9/11’? Surely it would be an interreligious naivety,
not to say insult, to expect Muslims to let other religious
orientations than Islam inspire them towards an attitude of
reconciliation that is, in the most literal sense, at the very
heart of Islam. Are we seriously to consider the polysemy of the
Judaeo-Christian Bible’s Song of Songs, to which
Kearney refers, as an argument that is going to win Muslims over
towards reconciliation? Moreover (contrary to some of the
examples Kearney gives: Griffith, Makransky, Tolstoy), the
sensitivity politics of interreligious and intercultural
hermeneutics would certainly abhor a situation where outsiders,
strangers, to one’s own religious tradition are claimed to
occupy a privileged vantage point from where to interpret
one’s own religious tradition; such a claim smacks of
condescension and hegemony (cf. van Binsbergen 2003b). How are
Muslims to be involved in the post-’9/11’
reconciliation process, on the basis of their own
spiritual traditions? This is for Muslims to say; and all
non-Muslims need to do is to reserve seats for Muslims around the
table, far more explicitly and generously than Kearney has
managed to do in his argument, even though his argument was
clearly written in the same spirit as my recommendation on this
point.
Kearney’s plea for hermeneutical tolerance is sympathetic,
timely and well-taken, but we need to be far more specific if we
want it to work. The hermeneutical recognition of polysemy alone
is not the answer to ‘9-11’. The point is not that
words can be interpreted in so many ways at the same time. The
point is, for instance, that, in the modern world, hardened
positions of exclusion and enmity represent a violence of words
simultaneous with – often even preceding – the physical
violence of deeds, while state-of-the-art technologies lend to
these violent words an unprecedented new power by diffusing them
all over the globe, at the same time lending the technological
means to bring them into violent practice. And the point is to
recognise militant Islamism, not as an inevitable and perennial
core of Islam, but as a recent and relatively deviant ideological
product of the very same globalisation of our times[6]
as has lend, to militant Islamism, its singularly widespread
appeal (through globalised media) and (in the sense of von
Trotha’s 2003 argument cited above) its singularly material
destructiveness. Militant Islamism, as a performative and
thus deliberately atavistic revival of jihadist tendencies of the
times of the Prophet Muh?ammad, is not the intrinsic nor the
inevitable format of contemporary Islam, but a re-invention, the
result of the marriage between Islam and recent globalisation.
Anyway, given the links between words and violence, one place
where reconciliation may be found is in the interstices between
words and between messages, in silence.
But that is not the only place.
As Kearney suggests, a legal framework ensuring fair trial may
also be a way to bring about ultimate reconciliation, and would
certainly not stand in the latter’s way. I do agree on this
point, and I am reminded of a case where the emphatic insistence
on non-violent patterns of confession, forgiving and
reconciliation, rather than on lawful punishment, may have
prevented the catharsis that is needed for a true overcoming of
the violence of the past: the South African Truth and
Reconciliation Commission.[7] But, much like I
myself in the latter work cited, Kearney does not give the
reasons why pardon should be complemented by justice – he
simply tells us that this is what Ricoeur posits.[8]
Another passage makes us wonder just how convincing
Kearney’s discourse on law – or on Christianity –
may be. When he refers in passing to ‘those discreet words
[of Jesus] in the sand that resisted murder’ (cf. the book
of John 8: 6 in the Christian New Testament) a number of
points may be made. This passage is generally considered, among New
Testament scholars, to be corrupt, a late insertion. The
original Greek text has ‘earth’, not ‘sand’
(a significant distinction in a time when working out
mathematical problems on sand was standard academic practice),
and speaks of ‘writing’ but not of ‘words’
– it may have been magical or divinatory signs, or – as
many commentators would have it – mere doodles to buy time.
Most important, I am puzzled that Kearney accuses Jesus’
interlocutors in that situation of murderous intentions.
In ways certainly to be abhorred from our present-day standpoint,[9]
but legal at the time (the beginning of the Common Era), they
were about to administer the standard communal punishment (death
by collective stoning) for an individual act of transgression
(adultery). In principle, murder is the infringement, not the
implementation, of the law of the land. Theologically,
Jesus’ reconciliatory action in this narrative illustrates
how he offsets the New Law, which from a Christian standpoint he
embodies (that of an accommodating love), against the Old Law,
which from a Christian standpoint he is considered to render
obsolete: that of formal strictness and retaliation.
Kearney’s ethnocentric misreading of this passage (i.e. his
projection, across time and space, of current North Atlantic
notions of the lawful versus the unlawful termination of human
life) shows how difficult it is, even for a hermeneutic
philosopher of the first ranks and of long standing, to develop
an intercultural hermeneutics of sufficient sophistication to
cope with a situation like ‘9/11’. Undeniably, by
North Atlantic national versions of public law, and by the human
rights code adopted by the great majority of states in the hope
of thus rendering it universal, the perpetrators of
‘9/11’ acted criminally; yet in their own eyes they
must have considered themselves legitimated by reference to some
higher law, and in the process they were prepared to sacrifice
not only other peoples’ lives but also their own.
Reconciliation is only possible if we do not deny this conflict
of perceptions of legality, but if, instead, we actively invent a
discourse (cf. van Binsbergen 2003b, especially the introduction)
in which, through creative symbolic sleight-of-hand, both
perspectives may be recognised, accommodated and overcome.
Thus it is only in principle that Kearney is right in his
claim that hermeneutic tolerance may be the way out of protracted
violent conflicts such as in Palestine/ Israel, Northern Ireland,
and Bosnia. As an instance of hermeneutic tolerance, the founding
of Christianity in the formal, collective acceptance, by
Jesus’ earliest followers, of Paul’s universalism has
only limited applicability to such situations, pace Kearney.
For although that foundation situation may have considerable
appeal to Christians as a model for emulation, it was very
small-scale, and it particularly lacked the history of
accumulated collective violent trauma in a conscious,
identity-constructing historic process, which characterises all
such protracted modern conflicts including that leading on to,
and following, ‘9/11’. It is the historicity of
identity formation through violence, which we have to deal
with in the context of ‘9/11’, on both sides; and that
has no parallels in the New Testament except perhaps
(obliquely and in largely unarticulated form) in the
confrontation between Jews and Romans (which, more than
Paul’s universalism, may well have been the prime factor in
the emergence of Christianity). Moreover, the subsequent two
millennia of Christian-Jewish relations (which, without much
exaggeration, may be summarised as a long chain of intolerance,
exclusion and violence inflicted upon Jews by Christians) has
shown that Paul’s universalism has seldom allowed his
spiritual heirs, the Christians, to effectively mobilise a
similar hermeneutic tolerance towards the co-religionists of the
founder of Christianity, the Jew Yoshua bar Miriam. Nor has the
appeal to such hermeneutic tolerance, however admittedly
foundational to Christianity (Badiou’s idea (2003) as cited
by Kearney is correct but far from new), inspired the
proclaimedly Christian U.S.A. leadership to employ that attitude
in its stance vis-à-vis the perpetrators of ‘9-11’.
Therefore, after identifying this kind of hermeneutical tolerance
as one of the ways out, Kearney would have been expected to spell
out how it can be practically deployed in the present situation,
by Christians not automatically practicing it, and by Muslims not
likely to be impressed by it as long as it is presented in
specifically Christian trappings. Of course Kearney far from
suggests that such hermeneutical tolerance is specifically
Christian: indeed, as I have argued elsewhere (van Binsbergen
2003a), any conflict resolution involving reconciliation depends
on it, and it is particularly small-scale African societies that
can be shown to have developed this socio-communicative
technology to high levels of perfection. In my argument cited, I
also explore the inner mechanisms of such reconciliation. These
turn out to involve, inter alia:
1.
the recognition that both sides in the conflict are, by their own
standards and perceptions, right, and act in rational integrity;
2.
secondly, the only way to reconcile two such positions is by a
hermeneutics that is not only tolerant, but that is to be
emphatically inventive and innovative: a new overarching
discourse needs to be invented that, in the eyes of both parties,
dissolves their irreconcilable positions of incompatible
rightness into compromise – which requires a skilful and
inspired, charismatic act of social communicative
sleight-of-hand;
3.
this can only be done by virtue of both parties recognising and
affirming each other’s common humanity which they share
– putting an end to all earlier rhetoric of mutual
demonisation.
Following Ricoeur, and in a way remarkably similar to mine yet
somewhat less concrete and practical, Kearney sees four benefits
to come from an hermeneutics of tolerance:
1.
an ethic of narrative hospitality (cf. my ‘recognition of a
shared humanity’);
2.
an ethic of narrative flexibility (cf. my
‘sleight-of-hand’);
3.
narrative plurality (cf. my recognition that both parties are
right and endowed with rational integrity);
4.
the transfiguring of the past (cf. my ‘creative and
innovative’); and is to ultimately lead on to
5.
‘exceptional moments (...) where an ethics of justice is
touched by a poetics of pardon’.
I could not agree more. Yet my opening question remains: What is
it in organised religion, that would privilege it to bring about
these five stages, over and above other communicative and
performative repertoires available in the modern world, despite
the fact that the latter is by and large involved in a process of
secularisation? Kearney tells us that the poetics of pardon
is usually of a spiritual or religious nature, but does not argue
his case. The extent to which, and the reason why, the process of
reconciliation should have religious overtones, remains the
crucial question behind his argument. It needs to be answered,
especially in the light of the fact that both opposing parties so
far have cast their demonising idiom in the terms of the world
religion they claim to adhere to. And again, in Kearney’s
concluding passage, there is the ominous ‘we’: for
‘us’, it is difficult to forgive the perpetrators of
‘9/11’ – but where is the empathic argument that
makes their position at least understandable, and would allow
‘them’ to forgive ‘us’, or would allow
humanity (‘history’) to forgive both ‘them’
and ‘us’?
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2003a, ‘Reconciliation: Ideas and procedures constituting
the African social technology of shared and recognised
humanity’, in: van Binsbergen 2003b: 349-374; earlier
version available at: http://www.shikanda.net/african_religion/reconcil.htm
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.,
2003b, Intercultural encounters: African and anthropological
lessons towards a philosophy of interculturality,
Berlin/Müenster, LIT; in part available at: http://www.shikanda.net/intercultural_encounters/index.htm
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.,
2004, ‘Postscript: Aristotle in Africa – Towards a
Comparative Africanist reading of the South African Truth and
Reconciliation Commission’, in: Salazar et al. 2004:
238-272; also at: http://www.quest-journal.net/2002.htm
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.,
& Schoffeleers, J.M., 1985, eds., Theoretical explorations
in African religion, London/ Boston: Kegan Paul
International.
Virilio, Paul, 2002, Ground
Zero, London & New York: Verso.
von Trotha, Trutz, 2003,
‘ Wars of defeat from Hiroshima to 9/11’, in: van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., ed., The dynamics of power and the rule of
law: Essays on Africa and beyond, Berlin/Münster/London:
LIT, pp. 263-284; cf. http://www.shikanda.net/ethnicity/just.htm
[1] Are we not all
trying to interpret ‘9/11’? In a collection I edited
recently, von Trotha (2003) insightfully argues that so-called
‘terrorist’ attacks constitute a totally new category
of warfare in their own right, characterised inter alia by
the fact that one derives one’s weapons not from the arms
trade but from among the technological complexity and
vulnerability of North Atlantic urban mass society itself: the
Internet, civil aviation, postal services, the convergence of
large numbers of people around train stations, etc.
[2] Kearney
acknowledges the intellectual movement (Freud, Girard etc.) that
sees religion as essentially a product of violence. I have no
quarrel with Kearney’s rendering of that movement, however
succinct, but I think the idea behind the movement is utterly
one-sided. Both Kearney (2001) and I (van Binsbergen 1981, van
Binsbergen & Schoffeleers 1985, and many later publications,
largely available at http://www.shikanda.net) have written
extensive theoretical arguments on religion, and this is not the
place for a debate on this point. Let me merely say this. In my
opinion religion is not just about the transmutation or
sublimation of violence. It is an (apparently almost inevitable)
by-product of human thought organised into patterned action and
relatively stable metaphors. It is risky to make presuppositions
about an undocumented distant past (the Middle Palaeolithic) when
we have evidence of interhuman violence but not of articulate
speech. Yet under contemporary, literate conditions it is safe to
say that violence may be as much a product of discursive thought
(inter alia, religious thought), as that discursive
thought (inter alia, religious thought) is a product of
violence.
[3] On Africa, cf. Ngwane 1996; van Binsbergen 2003a.
[4] This is not an
idle claim, but one based on my years of historical and
ethnographical research on North African popular Islam, around
1970 – basis for a two-volume scholarly study now being
finalised for publication.
[5] Failure to
appreciate how the vast majority of the North Atlantic population
is no longer actively committed to Christianity or Judaism also
affects other parts of Kearney’s argument. Thus he claims
that the tolerance between adversaries is to be increased by the
realisation that they both belong to the Abrahamic tradition (but
so do the opponents in the Northern Ireland conflict, and in most
conflicts that have waged in Europe in the course of the last
thousand years, including Christians’ treatment of Jews
throughout that period), and also (Ricoeur) by reading each
others’ sacred scripture. Again, the latter recommendation
is correct in principle, but how is it going to have a genuine
impact on the North Atlantic region today, and on North Atlantic
/ Muslim relations, if due to secularisation only a minority of
North Atlantic inhabitants identify as active adherents of the
Christian and Jewish faith any more, while Islam is establishing
itself, in the same region, rapidly and self-confidently?
Christianity may be the rhetorical and performative idiom of the
U.S.A. leadership, but it is no longer the worldview of all
U.S.A. citizens, let alone of all citizens of the rest of the
North Atlantic region.
[6] In other
words, I propose to analyse today’s contemporary militant
Islamism from the same perspective as that which I applied
elsewhere to Southern African ubuntu philosophy and to the
South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission; cf. van
Binsbergen 2001b, 2004. My approach has however generated
considerable controversy, cf. Bewaji & Ramose 2003.
[7] 1994-1998; cf. Salazar et al. 2004 with
references to the extensive literature; van Binsbergen 2004.
[8] The obvious
reason, not likely to be found with Ricoeur, is that the
opponents on both sides bring to the conflict and its subsequent
reconciliation general notions of justice, punishment and
retaliation which may be creatively addressed and negotiated in
the course of reconciliation (especially by a skilful outsider),
but hardly so creatively as to totally eclipse or obliterate
these notions; therefore, any reconciliation that does not take
such particularistic notions of justice into account, risks to
remain on performative, unable to prevent that the conflict
simmers on underneath as a form of resentment still demanding
satisfaction.
[9] Informed as this standpoint is by the explicit
formulation, canonisation, and globalisation, of ‘human
rights’, cf. the 1948 United Nations Declaration, after the
1789 model of the French revolution.
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