I
followed last Friday’s tragic events, as they unfolded, on my mobile phone on a
dance floor inside a club in Malta. As
soon as the death toll from Le Bataclan popped up on my screen, I became
visibly shocked. In part because I have always
liked Eagles of Death Metal, and in part because, also through my current
research on club music culture, I have come to see alternative music dance
floors and concert venues across the world as connected spaces of nighttime
leisure. The tragic events thus shook me
and struck deep and close to home. I
could only think of them as coordinated attacks, legitimized by religious codes
and beliefs, on people having fun and enjoying the Friday nightlife. The official statement by ISIS on Saturday,
claiming responsibility for the attacks, only confirmed my initial impression,
referring to those murdered at Le Bataclan as ‘pagans gathered for a concert of
prostitution and vice’.
So
do not tell me that religion has nothing to do with it.
Choosing
to believe in a god and to live a religious life is not the problem. It is when those beliefs turn into a cause
that strikes beyond the sphere of religion that the problem arises. In considering this and the tragic events, we
should be thinking about three important key issues. First, any side of religion that leads to a
sense of entitlement. At the kernel of
this lies a persuasion that living by the codes of one religion makes one
better off than anyone living by the codes of any other religion, or than those
who do not live by any religious code. A
projected sense of entitlement may be innocuous enough on its own. Choosing to place a ‘Jesus Loves Me’ bumper
sticker on the rear windshield of your car and believing that you are
privileged in the grace of god, for example, is fine, as long as you do not
expect to be entitled to parking spaces over anyone who does not. Believing that one is entitled to rule,
dictate, and bend the ‘rules of the Land’ because he or she is empowered by the
‘rules of God’, however, becomes a problem.
Second, any form of religion that leads to intolerance. Intolerance towards those who live by a
different system of belief or no system of belief at all, will always and
undoubtedly lead to conflict. Third, any
interpretation of religion that leads to imposition. Any attempt to impose one’s own code and
beliefs on others, especially through violent means, logically
cannot be characteristic of any religion that preaches peace and tolerance.
ISIS’s
statement claiming responsibility for the latest attacks in Paris reeks of
entitlement, intolerance, and the belief in a God-given right to impose.
Affirming
that organized religion does not really have to do with violence,
because religion is all about peace, would be naïve and short sighted in the
face of the evidence. Today there are
128 bodies waiting to be buried in Paris, clearly showing otherwise. Somewhere along the translation, violence is being justified. Closing one’s eyes to the fact that organized
religion may thus provide conditions and purpose, and be a vehicle for acts
like those that have unfolded, would mean closing one’s eyes to an essential
piece of a complex puzzle. That is
precisely why religion, in all its forms, especially how these manifest and
reinforce themselves in the ‘capillaries’ of human society, should continue to
be studied, and considered in tackling the terrorism problem in this day and
age. Most importantly, it should be
openly criticized.
Scores of men and women do not blow themselves up, knowingly leading to the deaths of
hundreds of others in the process, unless they firmly believe that they will
get rewarded directly and divinely in some afterlife as a consequence of and
following the very act. There must certainly
be plenty of plain old hate and anger towards the West brewing in there, but
all of it is comfortably embedded within and legitimized by a religious
structure, which is being appropriated as a cause.
There
is little doubt that ISIS had a lot to gain from these latest attacks in terms
of propaganda, especially when considering the blows it took on the battlefield
over recent weeks. Yet, beyond the
organization, its politics, and its propaganda machine, are those men and women
willing to actually die, and in the process kill, for God. A close consideration of religion should undoubtedly figure essentially
in any attempt to understand why they do it.
We should not respond to these acts with
intolerance towards those who are religious.
We should only hold it against those who seek to use religion to keep us from enjoying rock ‘n’
roll.
Peace, Love, Death Metal.
