The colonial invention of ‘religion’ and the myth of Westphalia

Despite the fact that ideas about ‘religion’ are so central to the category ‘religious terrorism’, religion never gets acknowledged as a category that might have to, at least, be defined rather than accepted as a taken-for-granted-concept. How Terrorism Studies could have produced so much scholarship on ‘religious’ terrorism without ever engaging with the discipline of Religious Studies, let alone engaging with the definition of religion, is, I would argue, another testament to the fallacy and weak evidential grounding of the Religious Terrorism Thesis. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of scholarship on ‘religious terrorism’ seems to be based on the widely held belief of religion’s natural propensity to war and violence if not kept private and out of politics.Footnote ²³ As Cavanaugh and other scholars from the disciplines of history as well as Religious Studies have demonstrated for some time now, this assumption is based on weak and unsubstantiated evidence about Europe’s past.Footnote ²⁴

However, as Gunning and Jackson note, this unsubstantiated assumption that religion constitutes a constant risk factor that can produce, increase, and brutalise violent conflicts has a long genealogy in Western scholarship and continues to inform dominant scholarship on terrorism.Footnote ²⁵ This assumption can be traced back to the common belief – which is a belief foundational to the disciplines of IR and Politics and widely accepted as common knowledge and truth – that the Peace of Westphalia constituted the starting point of modern international relations.Footnote ²⁶ However, as many scholars across disciplines have now pointed out, Westphalia has been misrepresented in a number of ways, for example, as constituting the establishment of the modern nation-state and sovereignty as a principle of it.Footnote ²⁷ This, as historians have noted, is a misrepresentation of the peace treaties and what they actually and historically achieved. Sovereignty, for example, was neither established here nor practised after as a result of these treaties specifically.Footnote ²⁸ It is also conveniently erased from the dominant narrative that European countries’ recognition of each other’s overseas territories was an essential demand of the treaties, showcasing how the development of the modern nation-state in Europe went hand in hand with the project of colonialism.Footnote ²⁹ This, yet again, demonstrates the inseparability of ‘modernity’ from its other side, ‘coloniality’.

However, the part of the Westphalian narrative – or Westphalian myth – that is important for understanding the origins of the Religious Terrorism Thesis is that of Europe’s so-called religious wars, which are said to have been ended with the Peace of Westphalia, which separated church from state power and created the secular, modern nation-state in Europe. As Cavanaugh notes, historians have since questioned the dominant narrative that the Thirty Years War was indeed ‘religious’.Footnote ³⁰ Nevertheless, this narrative has functioned as the ideological legitimation of the modern nation-state in Europe and therefore constitutes an essential element defining the advent of Western modernity (or as I argue colonial-modernity). According to Cavanaugh, the ‘attempt to create a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion that is essentially prone to violence is one of the foundational legitimating myths of the liberal nation-state’.Footnote ³¹ This narrative has further set into place a binary between ‘good religion’ (i.e. the religion that stays in the private sphere and is only concerned with inner spirituality) and ‘bad religion’ (which interferes in politics, causing violence as it had in Europe’s pre-modern past).Footnote ³²

‘Religion’, then, has meant different things at different times, depending on what purpose its employment was meant to serve.Footnote ³³ Whilst it was invented in post-Westphalian Europe as separate from the secular in order to ensure the legitimacy of and loyalty to the nation-state, it was reinvented during the era of European colonialism as a tool of subjugation against colonial subjects around the world. However, in all cases, ‘religion’ has served the project of Western modernity. In the 15th century and pre-Westphalia, the term religion was uncommon; it usually referred to an order or a monastery and was reserved for the Christian faith only.Footnote ³⁴ The adjective ‘religious’ was used to differentiate between people who took monastic vows and other people, who were Christian by default.Footnote ³⁵ During the Enlightenment period, the category ‘religion’ was then reinvented as something that was separate from and standing in opposition to the secular sphere of power, politics, science, and rationality.Footnote ³⁶ However, whilst ‘religion’ during its early reinvention in Europe still only applied to Christianity, it took on new meaning and was reinvented yet again to apply to other belief systems during the period of European colonial expansion. Crucial here is that this shift in meaning happened to fulfil a very specific (colonial) purpose.

During the era of colonial expansion, colonial administrators first denied ‘religion’ to Indigenous peoples on the basis that the concept ‘religion’, modelled on Christianity in Europe, did not fit the belief systems they encountered. It further was assumed that Indigenous people were not rational enough to have arrived at ‘religion’, a marker of civilisation that Europe had achieved.Footnote ³⁷ However, this subsequently changed when colonial administrators realised that assigning religion to colonial subjects could serve the purpose of privatising, sidelining, and erasing their cultures and belief systems in opposition to the coloniser’s culture, religion (i.e. Christianity), and values.Footnote ³⁸

The assigning of religion, then, acquired the function of confirming European superiority.Footnote ³⁹ Given that modern religion is based on the Christian, more specifically Protestant, model, religion consequently finds ‘its clearest an most developed manifestations in European avatars’.Footnote ⁴⁰ As a result, all other religions outside Europe constitute at best ‘rough drafts, archaic or primitive forms of religion’Footnote ⁴¹ and therefore can only ever occupy a subordinate position to Christianity, which is thereby linked to whiteness. They are implied to be ‘bad religion’ by default – religions that still need to be privatised as Europe had done to emerge out of its violent past. Assigning it to colonised peoples’ practices or beliefs therefore naturally racialises them as less developed and less civilised, serving as a racial signifier.Footnote ⁴² As Vial showed, assigning ‘religion’ fulfilled the same function as assigning ‘race’.Footnote ⁴³

The invention of ‘religion’ as a category that encompasses all major world religions was a colonial invention that served the purpose of sorting people (and their belief systems) on a race hierarchy.Footnote ⁴⁴ Monotheistic religions or religions with an assumed proximity to Christianity (and hence whiteness) were considered more developed and rational than, for example, so-called tribal religions. Thus, Africans and Aboriginals as well as other Indigenous people were considered at the bottom of a racial-religious hierarchy, their religions assumed as signifiers for their racial inferiority and lack of development. Interestingly, Islam was considered a tribal religion reserved for Arabs only for a long time before it was accepted as a monotheistic religion alongside Christianity.Footnote ⁴⁵ This, then, further highlights the historic racialisation of Islam in which Muslims are still implicated today.Footnote ⁴⁶

The Religious Terrorism Thesis, then, cannot be fully understood without understanding the colonial construction, genealogy, and employment of what we today know as ‘religion’. However, whilst ‘religion’ and its association with irrationality is a colonial invention and functioned as a colonial tool, ‘terrorism’, too, functions as a colonial tool, as I show in the next section.

The coloniality of ‘terrorism’

Similar to religion, terrorism, too, has meant different things at different times. Unlike, ‘religion’, terrorism, however, is acknowledged for its definitional instability and remains a hotly debated topic within Terrorism Studies. A survey of academic literature found over 100 different definitions of terrorism used by terrorism scholars.Footnote ⁴⁷ Most scholars of terrorism, however, usually agree on a few core elements that are central to ‘terrorism’ as a political concept, such as its political intention, violent mode, and the targeting or threat of targeting of civilians or civilian sites usually to invoke fear and/or terror.Footnote ⁴⁸ Thus, simply put, terrorism is usually understood as the violent targeting of civilians or civilian sites for political purposes.Footnote ⁴⁹

However, more important than its definitional debate is the discursive power ‘terrorism’ holds. As Richardson pointed out, the only universally accepted attribute of the term terrorism is that it is pejorative.Footnote ⁵⁰ Scholars of Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) have therefore argued for some time that it is the ‘productions and constructions of terrorism’ that should be studied rather than its content.Footnote ⁵¹ As CTS scholars have argued, terrorism functions as a negative ideograph within Western states, i.e. a cultural taboo.Footnote ⁵² Whilst an ideograph constitutes a virtue word, often used by political actors (such as freedom, democracy, justice), whose clear meaning or definition is assumed but in fact not clear at all,Footnote ⁵³ negative ideographs ‘identify a society’s key values by negation, defining what a society is not’.Footnote ⁵⁴

Terrorism as a discursive construct and negative ideograph, then, functions to work for and not against society and therefore, is naturally defined by what Western society is (supposed to be) not. The racialisation of the terrorist, then, seems an almost-logical consequence of this, which further facilitates the construction of the terrorist and terrorism as mainly non-Western, non-white. One important signifier of this racialisation of terrorism is the indirect denial of rationality to terrorism as a tactic and the terrorist as a perpetrator. Denying or assigning rationality has been a, if not the, main colonial tool of subjugation, mirrored by the denying and assigning of religion (also deemed to be a signifier for [ir]rationality), which has justified the colonisation, enslavement, and dispossession of lands and people.

As such, terrorism is regularly referred to as a form of ‘asymmetrical’ or ‘unconventional warfare’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Many definitions of terrorism have further included, or made central, the term ‘extranormativity’Footnote ⁵⁶ or describe it as an ‘unorthodox’ use of political violence.Footnote ⁵⁷ This is a coded way of ascribing disorder and irrationality to the terrorist actor and putting it in contrast with and as a challenge to the stability of the modern(-colonial) Westphalian system, implicated in whiteness.Footnote ⁵⁸ Thus, and as noted by Gentry and Sjoberg, the terrorist actor is regularly used to ‘exemplify disordered thinking or disordered politics’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Terrorism is also often framed as the ‘weapon of the weak’, which further positions terrorist actors in opposition to the strong, rational, and legitimate state.Footnote ⁶⁰ Terrorism constitutes the disordered and non-normative form of violence in contrast to the legitimate, ordered, and just violence perpetrated by the modern nation-state (such as counterterrorism). This is further tied to the inherent immorality attached to terrorism:Footnote ⁶¹ terrorist violence is seen as ‘senseless’ or ‘mindless’ violence,Footnote ⁶² ‘desperate’ violence,Footnote ⁶³ as well as the form of violence that in Western societies constitutes the ‘ultimate evil’, being ‘atrocious, mad, mindless’ and unjustifiable.Footnote ⁶⁴

Importantly, this dominant construction of terrorism relies on the assumption that terrorism is mostly perpetrated by non-state actors that challenge the legitimate, Westphalian state. As Gentry further observes, an epistemic bias against non-state actors in IR scholarship prevails as a result of the popular ‘Westphalian narrative’.Footnote ⁶⁵ This narrative is the foundational idea of the primacy and legitimacy of sovereign states in IR scholarship, which leads to the ‘hermeneutical injustice of denying power, credibility and ultimately legitimacy to nonstate actors’.Footnote ⁶⁶ This automatically delegitimises violence perpetrated by non-state actors. This also makes them prone to be labelled as ‘terrorist’. Sen further notes that this facilitates the delegitimisation of anti-colonial movements, which were and are often framed as ‘terrorist’.Footnote ⁶⁷ The fact that anti-apartheid activists were labelled as terrorists,Footnote ⁶⁸ with Nelson Mandela only taken down from the United States’ terrorism watchlist in 2007, is a case in point. Many other non-state, Indigenous, and anti-colonial revolts have been referred to as ‘terrorism’ by Europeans in the early 20th century.Footnote ⁶⁹

This primacy of the state, prevalent in IR scholarship, is also colonial. As noted above, the Westphalian state system as we know it today emerged at the same time as European colonial expansion. As Ahmed notes, the colonial project was integral to ‘the constitution of the modernity of European nations’. The relationship to its colonies was an important part of building the identity of the modern state in Europe.Footnote ⁷⁰ Thus, the primacy of states within IR scholarship is not only the primacy of states, it is the primacy of the modern(-colonial), Western, white state. This Westphalian system is also the modern-colonial system, which not only racialises and delegitimises non-state actors, or non-conforming religion as I have shown above, but also does so with non-Western states that do not conform to the modern-colonial ideal of a ‘state’. This then explains why ‘state terrorism’, on the rare occasions where it is addressed, is usually only discussed when it pertains to the non-Western, ‘developing’, ‘weak’, or ‘fragile’ state.Footnote ⁷¹ These states are not perceived as having arrived at the same stage of modernity and development as the West has.Footnote ⁷²

In the dominant Western discourse, then, state terrorism is often used to describe violent and persecutory practices of communist or totalitarian states, i.e. states associated with ‘eastern bloc’ nations or the ‘third world’.Footnote ⁷³ This is at once ‘distancing Western democratic regimes from the practice of terrorism and … enabling the construction of Western democracies as the victims of terrorism’.Footnote ⁷⁴ ‘Liberal democracies’ (code for the modern state) are therefore constructed as the natural victim of terrorism and the natural counterterrorist.

This demonstrates an understanding of terrorism not just as an attack on the legitimate state but also as an attack on modernity,Footnote ⁷⁵ one to which less developed, less modern states are naturally more susceptible. Terrorism scholars, such as Laqueur, for example, state that ‘terrorists want to disrupt economic, social and political order’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Terrorist actors are thereby positioned outside the ‘formal structures of power within the societies they attack’ and predominantly described as a mode of ‘violent and subaltern resistance’.Footnote ⁷⁷ As Hozic notes, the way terrorism is spectacularised in (Western) media and dominant discourse confirms state legitimacy and presents ‘terrorism in such a way that it start[s] working for and not against society’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Terrorism is consequently often described as targeting modern, Western democracies,Footnote ⁷⁹ which can be seen as an attack on the modern-colonial order more specifically.

Thus, although not all terrorism – acknowledged or labelled as such – is obviously racialised (as occurring in the non-West or perpetrated by non-Western, racialised people), it is nonetheless racialised conceptually as an act of violence that is imagined as an attack on either the state, modernity, or that which is associated with it. Thus, explicitly anti-capitalist, communist, and left-wing groups or dissent, even when perpetrated by ‘white’ actors, have much more readily been labelled and studied as ‘terrorism’Footnote ⁸⁰ than right-wing, white supremacist, and Christian-inspired terrorism, which is seriously under-studied and rarely labelled as such in the first place.Footnote ⁸¹ The notorious Ku Klax Klan in the United States, for example, has evaded the label to this day and instead is listed as a domestic extremist group or ‘hate group’.Footnote ⁸² These groups are (implicitly) system-affirming and not system-threatening and therefore do not readily fit into the racialised imagination of ‘terrorism’ as an attack on the state/modernity, which is also governed by white supremacy. Anti-capitalism and anarchism, on the other hand, constitute implicit threats to the modern(-colonial) system, which is built on capitalism.Footnote ⁸³ Thus, the dominant discourse on and imagination of ‘terrorism’ continues to be a tool to uphold coloniality, sometimes more directly, other times indirectly, but almost always to delegitimise groups or violence that threaten the global modern(-colonial) system, which is governed by the structures of white supremacy.

The Religious Terrorism Thesis

Whilst terrorism on its own already constitutes a racialised concept, explicitly referring to ‘religious terrorism’ constitutes a doubly racialised concept. It is system-threatening to modernity on two accounts. Consequently, ‘religious terrorism’ is constructed and imagined as incorrigible by default. The implications of this become clear from scholars’ – seemingly logical and natural – suggestion of exceptional measures for counterterrorism efforts when it comes to ‘religious’ terrorism.Footnote ⁹⁶ Portraying religious terrorists as more fanatical, irrational, and uncompromising appears to leave no choice but the suggestion of counterterrorism, which eliminates the group completely without considering negotiation or any root-cause approach.Footnote ⁹⁷ As CTS scholar Tellidis so aptly observed, ‘terrorism and violence more broadly generate distinct attention and security reflexes when linked to religion’.Footnote ⁹⁸

Richardson, for example, states that religious groups are far less open to compromise, and that they are therefore ‘less susceptible to conventional responses like deterrence or negotiation’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Hoffman states that ‘traditional counterterrorism approaches and policies may not be relevant, much less effective, in the face of religious terrorism’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Jones further argues that religious terrorists’ sacred values ‘[transcend] any pragmatic or purely self-interested motivations’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Their terrorism can therefore not be understood by conventional (rational) methods, and common counterterrorism measures are unlikely to be successful.Footnote ¹⁰² Enders and Sandler recommend more drastically that ‘[a] religious or amorphous terrorist group must be annihilated completely’ if security is to be provided to all potential targets of it.Footnote ¹⁰³ Contemporary counterterrorism practices, such as the United States-led War on Terror, demonstrate the exceptionality applied to terrorism considered to be ‘religious’ even more obviously and are well known to have disregarded liberal values, human rights, and other more measured approaches, usually considered befitting of liberal democracies and the modern nation-state more generally.

This narrative, positing the exceptionality of ‘religious terrorism’ despite a lack of evidence for its higher lethality, non-negotiability, or irrationality more generally, and the resulting suggestions and implications for harsher and exceptional counterterrorism practices, together constitute what I refer to here as the Religious Terrorism Thesis. However, the Religious Terrorism Thesis, as I have argued before, not only constitutes the dominant narrative on ‘religious terrorism’, it is also built on the colonial knowledge and imagination of ‘religion’ and ‘terrorism’, both of which facilitate the West’s construction and self-identification as the counterterrorist. This construction then facilitates the continuation of colonial practices of control, governance, and elimination of racialised bodies.

Interestingly, despite the well-known obsession of terrorism scholars with defining terrorism or at least endlessly debating it, in the vast majority of cases absolutely no attempt at defining religious terrorism is made at all; instead, its meaning is taken for granted and assumed to be common sense, as it is based on an essentialist, and as I argue colonial and racial, understanding of religion in the first place. Thus, what can be observed in academic terrorism literature is that most scholars, instead of providing a definition of religious terrorism, seek to distinguish it from other, secular forms of terrorism by outlining some of their, supposedly, typical characteristics. In other words, they invoke the Religious Terrorism Thesis as proof for the Religious Terrorism Thesis. Religious terrorism is assumed to be more dangerous, irrational, lethal, and uncompromising than secular terrorism since it is common-sense knowledge that religion is prone to violence and fanaticism – especially when it is paired with the assumption that it is perpetrated by non-White actors who are assumed to be more susceptible to ‘religion’ to begin with.

David Rapoport, who is usually credited with introducing the scholarly rubric of ‘religious terrorism’ into Terrorism Studies, first referred to it as ‘holy terror’ or ‘sacred terror’ in his widely cited article ‘Fear and trembling: Terrorism in three different religious traditions’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ He further labelled religious terrorism as the ‘fourth wave’ of terrorism, which emerged, or to be more precise resurged, in the 1980s, allegedly lasting until today and mainly represented by its Islamic manifestation.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The notion of a distinctively religious terrorism therefore became popular in the wake of his work and in response to the growth of Islamist movements after the Iranian revolution and the increase of suicide bombings in Lebanon in the 1980s.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ It therefore pre-dated 9/11, although it subsequently increased exponentially. Although Rapoport has in many ways established the sub-category ‘religious terrorism’ within Terrorism Studies, he also never provides an actual definition of religious terrorism. Instead, he implies the commonsensical nature of ‘religious terrorism’ as something that has always existed and, in fact, can be observed throughout history as the earliest form of terrorism more generally. Religion for Rapoport, then, is the historical basis of terrorism.

Rapoport claims that the ‘holy’ terrorist is motivated by a transcendent purpose where a ‘deity’ provides the ends and means to the terror: ‘The transcendent source of holy terror is its most critical distinguishing characteristic; the deity is perceived as being directly involved in the determination of ends and means.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷ HoffmanFootnote ¹⁰⁸ and JuergensmeyerFootnote ¹⁰⁹ are among the most prominent scholars who expanded on the literature on religious terrorism in the 1990s after it was introduced by Rapoport. Religious terrorism is presented by them and other scholars as ‘new’ (but also ancient at the same time) as well as uniquely more lethal, brutal, non-negotiable, and less discriminate.Footnote ¹¹⁰

However, like Rapoport, most of them either do not provide a definition for religious terrorism or provide one based on an uncritical and essentialist understanding of religion as ‘common sense’, which erases its colonial origins and the function it fulfilled during the European project of colonial expansion. Instead, most scholars invoke the supposedly unique characteristics of ‘religious terrorism’ in lieu of a definition. Jessica Stern defines ‘religious terrorism’ as those acts of terrorism committed by actors who ‘claim to be seeking religious goals’ and further asserts that ‘religious terrorist groups are more violent than their secular counterparts and probably more likely to use weapons of mass destruction’.Footnote ¹¹¹

Bruce Hoffman, one of the most prominent scholars on the ‘new’ religious terrorism, does make an attempt at defining it; according to him, religious terrorism is ‘terrorism motivated either in part or whole by religious imperative, where violence regarded as a divine act of duty or sacramental act’; he then goes on to argue that it ‘embraces markedly different means of legitimation and justification than that committed by secular terrorists, and these distinguishing features lead, in turn, to yet greater bloodshed and destruction’.Footnote ¹¹² He further states that religious terrorism ‘assumes a transcendental dimension’.Footnote ¹¹³ On another occasion, he provides a slightly more specific definition and states that he ‘define[s] terrorism as “religious” when some liturgy, scripture or clerical authority is involved in sanctioning the violent act’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ However, Hoffman, like so many other authors, does not provide a clear definition of what he perceives to be ‘religious’ in the first place, and what qualifies as ‘liturgy’, ‘scripture’, and/or ‘clerical authority’. Juergensmeyer in his book Terror in the Mind of God similarly provides such a lacking definition.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Religious terrorism constitutes ‘public acts of destruction, committed without a clear military objective, that arouse a widespread sense of fear … for which religion has provided the motivation, the justification, the organization, and the world view’. Whilst none of these scholars have engaged with critical scholarship on ‘religion’, they all agree on the higher lethality and danger of terrorism that is considered ‘religious’.

Another popular assumption among these scholars is that notions of sacrifice, ritual, and martyrdom are uniquely ‘religious’ and therefore predispose the religious terrorist to higher lethality and less restraint.Footnote ¹¹⁶ This is closely connected to the implication that suicide terrorism is a typical characteristic of religious terrorism.Footnote ¹¹⁷ This is further closely tied to the popular assumption that the religious terrorist perpetrates his actions for first and foremost ‘symbolic’ rather than strategic value, further implying its higher degree of irrationality.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Juergensmeyer refers to religious violence as ‘performance violence’, whose violence could better be analysed as ‘symbol, ritual or sacred drama’, rather than trying to understand it as strategic.Footnote ¹¹⁹ As Rapoport states, ‘for the holy terrorist the primary audience is the deity’ and not the public audience.Footnote ¹²⁰ Jones’s account of ‘sacred terror’ clearly illustrates the notion of irrationality that accompanies the concept of religious terrorism. According to him, it would be a ‘mistake to seek to understand religiously motivated terrorists using the game theoretic or rational choice models so prominent in the social sciences’. Religious terrorists cannot be understood rationally, as their motivations stem from ‘sacred values’ which are held for ‘non-instrumental reasons’ and their actions are therefore not ‘motivated by rational or pragmatic calculus’.Footnote ¹²¹ Religious terrorism is therefore argued to be different (i.e. less rational) from secular terrorism as it has ‘no real-world constituency’.Footnote ¹²²

The irrationality of religious terrorists is further implied through these scholars’ popular assertion that the religious terrorist (unlike the secular one) is driven by cosmic, dualistic, and polarised worldviews.Footnote ¹²³ Or as Cronin claims, the religious terrorist ‘feel[s] engaged in a Manichaean struggle of good against evil’.Footnote ¹²⁴ The assumption that religious terrorism is dictated by dualistic, unreasonable, and nihilistic worldviews further informs the popular assumption that this kind of terrorism is ‘incorrigible’, to use Paul Wilkinson’s words.Footnote ¹²⁵ This kind of terrorism is non-negotiable since the religious terrorist is willing to neither negotiate nor compromise, nor does he care about any other (earthly) constituency or audience than God and himself.Footnote ¹²⁶ The religious terrorist has no tangible, attainable goals but rather transcendental ones. He is therefore unrestrained and prone to use weapons of mass destruction.Footnote ¹²⁷

Important to note here is that most of these scholars rarely, if ever, discuss Christian-inspired violence as implicated in this category. The colonial invention of ‘religion’ as a Euro- and Christian-centric concept, as discussed above, seems to shield Christian forms of violence from being implicated in ‘bad religion’ or the kind of racialised religion that is imagined as prone to violence/terrorism in the first place. Instead, most scholars seem to use the category ‘religious terrorism’ as code for ‘Islamist terrorism’. Cronin, for example, outlines the central characteristics of ‘religious terrorism’ as more brutal, lethal, destructive, and non-negotiable and then goes on to refer to the ‘jihad era’ as showcasing this.Footnote ¹²⁸ The only example she provides for this ‘religious terrorism’ is Al Qaeda. Sageman’s work is another example of the dominant linking of ‘religious terrorism’ to Islam.Footnote ¹²⁹ Almost all of his work is solely focusing on Al Qaeda and the rise of ‘Salafi’ jihadism. Ranstorp similarly almost exclusively discusses the menace of the Muslim religious terrorist, also focusing mainly on Al Qaeda and jihadism.Footnote ¹³⁰ Laqueuer uses almost exclusively Islamic cases of terrorist groups or acts. The other examples he uses are still non-Christian and non-Western.Footnote ¹³¹ Whilst Hoffman, Juergensmeyer, and Rapoport also draw on other examples than just Islamic ones for ‘religious terrorism’, it is no surprise that the majority of terrorism scholars discussing ‘religious terrorism’ see it as code for ‘Islamist terrorism’: although Rapoport, as the founder of the category ‘religious terrorism’, also drew on other examples, he claimed that Islam is ‘at the heart’ of the category ‘religious terrorism’.Footnote ¹³² Thus, even Critical Terrorism scholars who have spearheaded critique of the dominant discourse on ‘religious terrorism’ often and involuntarily end up reproducing this connection between Islam and terrorism.Footnote ¹³³

‘Ancient prototypes’: Religious terrorism as regress from modernity

As noted above, Rapoport’s understanding of ‘religion’ is typically essentialist, stemming from the Christian-centric conception of ‘religion’ in colonial-modernity. This is further evidenced by his discussion of the ancient ‘prototypes’ of religious terrorism, which all constitute non-Western and ‘Oriental’ examples. These prototypes, which Rapoport identifies as the Jewish ‘Sicarii’/Zealots, the Hindu ‘Thugs’, and the Ismaili Shia sect, the ‘Assassins’, are one of the most important building blocks of Rapoport’s account of religious terrorism, which is repeatedly cited among both scholars and policymakers to this day. Rapoport refers to the Zealots, Thugs, and Assassins as ‘precursors’ of religious terrorism to demonstrate the inherent (causal) link between religion and terrorism. As Rapoport further states, ‘despite a primitive technology, each [group] developed much more durable and destructive organizations than has any modern secular group’.Footnote ¹³⁴ Important to note here is that Rapoport’s account of the Thugs clearly draws from colonial records, which he emphasises in multiple places of his article, sometimes quoting colonial administrators’ accounts of the Thugs at full length.Footnote ¹³⁵ But the accounts of the Jewish Sicarii and the Ismailian Assassins have also been refuted by historians as inaccurate.Footnote ¹³⁶ However, despite the fact that Rapoport’s prototype-narrative is deeply colonial and based on weak scholarly foundations and evidence, it has become an unquestioned and repeatedly recycled narrative.Footnote ¹³⁷

According to this popular account of the ancient prototypes, the Zealots, Assassins, and Thugs constituted independent groups who conducted violence for religious purposes. The Thugs, according to the popular, Western narrative, were a Hindu sect of travellers who killed innocent strangers on the road by strangling their victims, simply for the pleasure of the Hindu goddess Kali, the goddess of ‘terror and destruction’. Apparently, they had no political reason or cause for their actions that they wanted to be known to the wider public, and they killed their victims clandestinely.Footnote ¹³⁸ The Assassins were a Muslim, millenarian, Persian Shia sect who, unlike the Thugs, did want political attention and change as a result of their actions. Rapoport holds that ‘terror in Islam, therefore, has an extra dimension not present in Hinduism’.Footnote ¹³⁹ The Assassins killed their victims by stabbing them in open places where publicity was ensured, and their subsequent capture was welcomed, which, as Rapoport suggests, further showcases Islam’s love of martyrdom. The Zealots, a Jewish group who also killed with the dagger, sought to inspire uprisings against Roman rule and similarly killed in open places to ensure publicity and motivate revolts.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Not surprisingly, these groups, so commonly used as prime examples for religious terrorism, are all ‘Oriental’, with the Thugs originating in what is today India and the Assassins and Zealots of Persian and Middle Eastern origin. They work so well as examples for the early forms of religious terrorism because their places of origin are already part of a racist and colonial imagination of the Orient and more generally the non-West as a place susceptible to fanaticism and the ‘grip of religion’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The cases themselves do not have strong scholarly grounding either. As Tickell points out, historic and colonial records that have described the Thugs as religious fanatics are questionable and their credibility not established.Footnote ¹⁴² Indeed, some colonial accounts note the prosecution of both Muslim and Hindu Thugs, which brings into question the dominant narrative of the Thugs as a caste organisation which was killing for no other purpose but devotion to the Hindu goddess Kali.Footnote ¹⁴³ This is further supported by Wagner, who criticises how popular contemporary accounts of the Indian Thugs are derived from colonial records: ‘Similar to witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, the only sources available to historians examining the “Thugs” of early nineteenth-century India are those produced by the very authorities who persecuted them.’Footnote ¹⁴⁴ McQuade’s excellent critique of Rapoport’s colonial account further elaborates on how this narrative was not only convenient for colonial administrators but also rooted in the colonial imagination of Indian religion: ‘The notion that thuggee constituted a religious phenomenon fit well with British colonial perceptions of Indians as an inherently superstitious people held in the thrall of an exotic and barbaric religion.’Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Rapoport’s colonial bias further becomes clear from his commentary regarding the differences among those prototypes. According to Rapoport, the Hindu Thugs were the least comprehensible terrorists, as they had ‘no cause that they wanted others to appreciate’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Instead, their violence was allegedly non-political and symbolic only. They killed for ‘obscure religious reasons’ alone.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ As Rapoport further explains, the Islamic Assassins’ cause was more comprehensible, but the Jewish Zealots were especially ‘understandable’ to some degree because they sought national liberation as one of their major goals.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The Thugs, however, ‘did things that seem incongruous with our conception of how “good” terrorists should behave’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Good terrorists, it seems, are supposed to fight for something understandable, such as national liberation. This, I argue, would constitute an indirectly system-affirming goal: it supports the Western, modern-colonial imagination of nationalism as the principal element defining the modern era and therefore advance and progress.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ This is linked to the Westphalian primacy of the state dominating the study of IR as discussed further above.

Rapoport’s reliance on and presentation of these three cases is deeply flawed and embarrassingly non-scientific. Yet these cases remain unquestioned and reiterated by almost every terrorism scholar writing on religious terrorism within (mainstream) Terrorism Studies. The scholars, besides Rapoport, who can best be described as the supporting pillars of the dominant discourse on religious terrorism include Hoffman, Cronin, Laqueur, and Kaplan. Bruce Hoffman, who is today known as a world-leading expert on terrorism and counterterrorism, is one of the most prominent scholars who perpetuates the Religious Terrorism Thesis. As he claims, the perpetrators of religious terrorism are ‘unconstrained by … political, moral, or practical constraints’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Not only do statements such as these have clear, even if unspoken, implications for counterterrorism, they also draw on unsubstantiated evidence. In this case, for example, Hoffman evidences his remarks about religious terrorists’ lack of restraint with a reference to Rapoport’s example of the Thugs, Assassins, and Zealots. Many other scholars have done the same and unquestionably accepted Rapoport’s account on the Thugs, Assassins, and Zealots as established fact and as proof for the Religious Terrorism Thesis they perpetuate on this basis. As becomes even clearer in the next section, the Assassins, Thugs, and Zealots trope constitutes a main pillar of the (colonial) discourse on ‘religious terrorism’, especially within Terrorism Studies.

Religion as the natural and historical basis for terrorism

Interestingly, the ancient prototype trope often gets cited as not just the oldest example of ‘religious terrorism’ but also as an example for the oldest forms of terrorism more generally. As I have indicated above, the Religious Terrorism Thesis is a product of the colonial invention of religion; however, it is also reinforcing the colonial logic inherent to discourses on ‘terrorism’ more generally. It further shows that ‘terrorism’ needs to be interrogated for the colonial logic that is perpetuated in the discourses surrounding it. This starts with the ‘origin story’ of terrorism. Rapoport himself in his essay draws on the examples of these three prototypes to illustrate the ‘ancient lineage of terrorism’.Footnote ¹⁵² Notable here is that he speaks of terrorism more generally and not necessarily ‘religious’ terrorism. Cronin similarly refers to the Zealots, Assassins, and Thugs to claim that ‘terrorism is as old as human history’.Footnote ¹⁵³ She refers to them more specifically to demonstrate the ‘deep roots’ of contemporary terrorism (which most terrorism scholars identify as mainly religious, most clearly exemplified by the events of 9/11). Kaplan similarly refers to the trope of the Zealots, Assassins, and Thugs in a recent article where he argues that ‘violence is inherent to all religions’ and then goes on to imply that religious terrorism is the oldest form of terrorism more generally.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Hoffman more indirectly supports this with the cliché of noting that ‘terrorism and religion share a long history’.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Neuman, also referring to the Assassins, Zealots, and Thugs trope, claims that the ‘oldest instances of terrorism can be attributed to groups or individuals claiming to act in the name of faith’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Richardson more specifically notes that the religious Zealots and Assassins are the ‘historical precursors’ of suicide terrorism more generally.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Laqueur implies the same with reference to the Assassins more specifically.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

Drawing on the alleged long history of religious terrorism further and conveniently relieves scholars from having to problematise, let alone define, ‘religion’, given that its nature and propensity to violence and terrorism is assumed to be a given and proven by history. It further functions to erase its coloniality. It signifies the regress inherent to modern terrorism, especially the kind that is deemed ‘religious’. As Neuman, commenting on the rise of religious terrorism, states, ‘one would expect globalisation to promote more enlightened, more secular and more rational attitudes and ideologies, but instead we see a rise in seemingly medieval ideas’’Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Thus, the ‘new’ terrorism of today (which apparently is predominantly religious) is also ‘old’ and actually constitutes a regress from modernity and signifies the failure of modernity especially in non-Western (less ‘developed’) contexts.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ This logic is also illustrated by Rapoport’s remarks, arguing that the contemporary, sacred terrorist finds his ‘rationale in the past’, in divine revelations from the past, sanctifying their violence.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Hoffman refers to religious terrorism as an ‘ancient breed adversary’,Footnote ¹⁶² and Ranstorp further claims that the ‘resort to terrorism by religious imperative … [is] deeply embedded in the history and evolution of the faiths’.Footnote ¹⁶³

The racial implication of connecting religious terrorism to the past and its contemporary forms as desperate responses to the superior processes of secular advancement and globalisation further becomes clear from the example provided by Munroe and Moghaddam, who, writing on the connection between religion and terrorism, argue that religion needs to be seen as a major cause for terrorism as it has repeatedly resurfaced in ‘desperate’ societies.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ They use the case of Indigenous Americans during the ‘American Indian Wars’ in 1865–91 to illustrate how Indigenous Americans, as a result of the threat of extinction due to the westward-moving white settlers, ‘clung fast to religion’ and responded with violence, best understood as terrorism. Thus, they argue that due to desperation and the fear of loss of identity, Indigenous Americans became more religious and transformed some of their peace rituals into war rituals ultimately resorting to terrorism.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ In other words, Munroe and Moghaddam imply that Indigenous American resistance to setter colonialism (which included colonial genocide) constituted a form of ‘religious terrorism’. This deeply problematic argument does many things at once: it perpetuates the colonial ascription of ‘religion’ to ‘tribal’ and ‘native’ peoples where the colonial concept of ‘religion’ did not pre-exist in society; it also shows how the Religious Terrorism Thesis functions to justify and rationalise counterterrorism perpetrated against minorities and marginalised or, in this case, colonised communities. Although Munroe and Moghaddam do not explicitly justify settler colonialism, their rationalisation and language used for explaining Indigenous American behaviour through the assigning of ‘religiosity’ and ‘terrorism’ are likely to provide the grounds for exactly this. Thus, the assigning of both labels ‘religion’ and ‘terrorism’ to Indigenous Americans in this case is colonial and harmful and, as I argue, especially so in combination, invoking the Religious Terrorism Thesis.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

Other scholars contribute to this line of argument. The theme of ‘desperation’ of marginalised communities as a cause for their (religiously) terrorist actions is commonplace. A popular claim in the dominant academic literature on terrorism is that religious terrorism’s resurgence can be explained by desperation and identity crises of, especially non-Western, people who failed to benefit from globalisation (and advancement) the way other (more advanced) civilisations, such as the West, have.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Rapoport’s foundational article already provides this narrative, and it is further reiterated by the most prominent terrorism scholars. Ranstorp for example, explains that globalisation has led to an increased sense of ‘fragility, instability, and unpredictability’ among religious extremist groups.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ This further serves to make the racial and colonial implication that non-Western people are more susceptible to the grip of religion and less advanced, therefore struggling to keep up with Western-led advancement.

This narrative, dominant in mainstream Terrorism Studies and IR literature more generally, ties the Religious Terrorism Thesis to the ‘new terrorism’ thesis. The ‘new’ terrorist, it is claimed by the most prominent terrorism scholars, is mainly religious (and mainly Muslim). Thus, whilst the new terrorism, or the fourth wave as Rapoport referred to it, is mainly ‘jihadist’ in character, hence ‘religious’, it is also at the same time a resurgence of ‘old’/ancient terrorism, the terrorism for which religion has historically always served as the basis. It therefore seems that we have come full circle. When we refer to terrorism today, religion is usually implied either directly or indirectly. When it is not implied, it is imagined nonetheless. The images the term ‘terrorism’ conjures up today are those of Muslim fanatics, driven by religious zeal. This, as I have argued in this article, further implies that religion is inscribed on the idea of terrorism; historically, in the public imaginary, and in scholarship more generally.