I wrote last week about a new study questioning law enforcement’s received wisdom on the nature of radicalization as it applies to efforts to combat homegrown (Muslim) terrorism.
One line in my post indicated that according to the report, in the social scientific data, radicalized “persons are commonly only marginally ‘religious.’” That line was lifted and made the title of the post which made it more central than it really was and also slightly changed its meaning.
In a thoughtful and helpful reply James Scaminaci questions the notion that radicalization might not be related to “religion,” showing how an important component of radicalization is a “worldview based in religion: a battle of Good versus Evil and an apocalyptic view” and I certainly agree with him. Indeed, I have written about that regularly with regard to the Tea Party movement. James writes on these issues over at Political Chili.
What is at issue here is what counts as religion; which is why I put the word in quotes in the original post and also here. What the study said, specifically, was that the research on radicalized Muslims found that those Muslims were not particularly “religious.” The studies measure “religious-ness” in terms of specific practices like regular reading of the Qur’an, level of sophistication with regard to Islam, advanced study in religion, and so on. Of course this is a methodological problem with these kinds of studies: a scholar having devoted a lifetime to study ranks as highly religious but a barely literate intense believer ranks as less so.
So the radicalized Muslims were likely to hold simplistic and uninformed views about Islam (making them no less religious in my mind but less so in terms of the study). That is not to say that there is not an important religious component to radicalized Islam, just as there is a fundamentally religious component to the Tea Party movement.
This is an ongoing conversation in the study of religion and it occurs with regard to all religions. Robert Orsi gives a wonderful example in his book, The Madonna of 115th Street. Who is more “religious,” the Catholic believers who put “holy water” from a city water supply in their car radiators before going on long trips, or the Catholic hierarchy that claims the right to say what is “really Catholic?”
But of course, the important part of the Brennan Center report was not this complicated question of what counts as “authentic” religion but the fact that the current model for monitoring radicalization is overly simplified, too linear, and based on strategies countered by the social scientific data. It results in both the violation of religious freedom of American Muslims and undermines the proven strategies for combating radicalization.
Thanks, James, for pushing me to clarify.
