Who stabbed Salman Rushdie?
Ibrahim Sajid Malick
Client Executive @ World Wide Technology | AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional, CCIE
Whether in its own right or as a proxy for political battles, religion has long contributed to violent conflict worldwide. After the unfortunate stabbing of Salman Rushdie, pundits in the media (Bill Maher) are in full swing accusing religion, in this case, Islam, as the root cause of violence.
But theatrics aside, there is an academic debate around the same topic. Karen Armstrong, Mark Juergensmeyer, and William Cavanaugh provide a theoretical framework for studying violence in Islam.?Armstrong claims that "violence" is economic, political, and cultural. But Juergensmeyer contests that religion is the most important cause underlying all violence. Both scholars rely heavily on a distinction between religious and secular violence in their analyses. Cavanaugh regards such a distinction as itself "a legitimation of secular forms of violence" that obscures the "real" causes of what we call religious violence.
Despite being a universal and a prominent part of humanity,? defining religion is surprisingly tricky because it includes many stories, leaders, doctrines, rituals, and institutional forms manifest in tribal societies and major world traditions. Immanuel Kant, Sigmund Freud, Paul Tillich, and Clifford Geertz have provided us with philosophical, psychological, theological, and cultural definitions. Nevertheless, they all seem to describe the elephant's different parts.?
Do you think religion (Islam) is the root cause of violence??