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Essay on Critical Analysis: Terror In The Mind Of God
The book Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence by Mark Juergensmeyer should be required reading as we try to grasp the full dimensions of the "war against terrorism." Americans especially suffer from a nearly insuperable blindness when it comes to the role of religion in the political and cultural lives of most of humanity. Our proud American traditions of religious tolerance, diversity, pluralism, and separation of church and state, essential and crucial as they are to our own culture and life, make it nearly impossible for us to grasp the fact that those ideas are almost entirely unknown to most cultures and societies on our planet. Juergensmeyer's book is the best in the field at offering a comprehensive overview of the role religion plays in various terrorist movements around the world. In addition, it provides a general theoretical framework for those phenomena.
The first half of the book draws on Juergensmeyer's study of specific religiously inspired terrorist groups. He starts close to home in reporting on individuals and groups in the United States prepared to bomb abortion clinics and kill physicians. He then moves on to consider other "Christian" terrorist groups such as the various White Supremacist groups in the United States and the religious roots of the conflict in Northern Ireland. (Juergensmeyer, 2000)
He then examines various Jewish groups involved in assassination and bombing in the name of Judaism, Islamic groups involved in the first World Trade Center bombing and suicide missions in Israel, Sikh terrorist movements in India, and Aum Shinrikyo's biological weapon attacks in Japan.
In each case, the strength of Juergensmeyer's treatment is that he combines a fairly detailed description of the specifics of the individuals and groups in question with an equally carefully analysis of their theological justifications for their actions.......
