Ivan Strenski

Talal Asad’s ‘Religion’ Trouble and a Way Out

By this point, almost everyone is familiar with Talal Asad’s assault on the “religion” category. Despite his influence, Asad’s criticisms tend to oscillate between two mutually exclusive positions. I shall argue that Asad’s incoherence is instructive for the field as a whole. The study of religion would be better off constructing useful and revisable definitions of “religion” rather than abandoning the category all together.

Ari Shavit Broods Over Israel’s Sins and Celebrates Its Virtues

My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel is one of those books whose subtitle reveals more than its title. Israeli journalist for the left-of-center newspaper Ha’aretz, Ari Shavit seeks to address what he calls the ‘‘core contradictions of Zionism,’’ and by so doing to ‘‘tell the Israel story’’ (p. xiv). Significantly as well, the book was published outside Israel, and in English. One must presume that Shavit’s audience is the Diaspora, and primarily that of North America. What this means is unclear. Nevertheless, the temptation to speculate is irresistible. Thus, is Shavit’s story already so well-known in Israel, as so much of her ‘‘real’’ history is, compared to what the Diaspora takes as gospel, that it hardly bears retelling there? The reception of this book, both in Israel and the Diaspora, should be interesting to watch, indeed. Finally, the end result of Shavit’s meditations, intended or not, will also be to conjure some of the most profound dilemmas in political thought. Are all states founded in violence or crime? If so, what obligations, if any, do subsequent generations have for atonement and=or compensation to the victims? Shavit begins that 18-chapter story with an emblematic tale of Zionism’s ‘‘core contradiction’’—the saga of his own great-grandfather, a 19th-century romantic Zionist, Herbert Bentwich. Shavit moves swiftly into the present, touting the achievements of Israel’s secretive nuclear installation at Dimona, but expressing equally his fear of the correspondingly secretive Iranian nuclear program. Shavit stops to admire the patriotic, pioneer spirit of a youth cult centered on Masada, but then quickly retreats to conflicting feelings of vulnerability when recalling Israel’s encirclement by hostile states. Shavit boasts of Israel’s success as a world leader of high-tech start-ups, its vibrant multicultural and multiracial refugee immigrant population, and the triumphs and travails of the kibbutzim, but also confesses the extent of the contradictory political clout and retrograde intensity of the Greater Israel vision of West Bank Rightist settlers. Palestinian ambitions for national recognition stand oddly opposed to Jewish flight from the Muslim and Arab world. Shavit is a good enough journalist to know when to relieve tensions from immersion in these life-and-death situations by plunging us into the frenetic sybaritic world of the Tel Aviv club scene. But, Shavit doesn’t let readers savor the Terrorism and Political Violence, 27:359–367, 2015 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0954-6553 print=1556-1836 online DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2015.1006095

Reply to my Critics

First, my sincere thanks to the editors of Politics, Religion & Ideology and the three reviewers for their devotion to the task. Yet, at the risk of seeming ungrateful, I believe only Philpott has grasped the radical thrust of the book. Only he appreciates how thoroughly it attempts to smash prevailing paradigms for thinking about religion, power and politics. The beginnings of each chapter specifically alert readers not to expect business as usual. The book’s program is to pry open the tightly clenched fists of conventional thinking about religion. It takes the gloves off our talk of power and politics, rather than engaging in the same old fisticuffs. Yet, Haynes and Steinfels seem bent upon shadow-boxing with the same old conceptions of thinking and writing about religion, power and politics. Accordingly, I shall direct most of my rejoinder to the self-contradictory misreadings in their responses, and hence their limited understandings. Jeffrey Haynes dwells on issues arising out of the local/general nature of the book’s reference – ‘its focus and generality’. At times, he wants me to be more general in places where I am local, while at other times wanting me to speak more locally rather than striving to reach some sort of general conclusions. As to my being local where I should be general, Haynes insinuates a kind of American ethnocentrism at work in the book. Thus, he says that I, ‘like many other American scholars’, (sic) look at things from a (local) ‘US perspective’. (I am sorely tempted to retort that ‘like many British scholars’ (sic), Haynes stereotypes American scholars. And, let’s leave aside for a moment that both my first degree and doctorate come from British, not US, universities.) So, I find it odd to imagine that when I write of the general category, the ‘West’, that I really mean specific local situations in the USA. Haynes even feels that my spending ‘considerable time’ – only one of five chapters! – ‘on a US obsession: “human bombers” in the “Middle East”’, shows how ethnocentric the book is. But, here I think Haynes fires well wide of the mark. Yes, the book culminates in a treatment of Islamic ‘human bombers’ in the Middle East. But, by what standard does interest in human (‘suicide’) bombers in Israel/Palestine, not to mention Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, constitute proof of a peculiarly American ‘obsession’? Further, how does the charge of preferring American data square with the book’s almost total reliance on the historical analyses of the European thinkers and institutions, from sixth-century Western Roman Empire to Tony Blair? Or, how do I reflect peculiarly American ‘obsessions’ in drawing principally upon British historian, John Neville Figgis (12 entries in the index) and French Louis Dumont (23 entries in the index), to attack an Oxford-educated anthropologist Saudi, like Talal Asad (22 entries in the index)? No American author receives anything close to the number of references as these Europeans. One would, therefore, be on far

Hans Penner, Horatio and the Terminator: A review essay of Radical Interpretation in Religion

Abstract Adaptations of Donald Davidsons meta-methodology of “radical interpretation” by Hans Penner and colleagues create more problems than they solve. Penners affirmation of both holistic and naturalistic approaches to the study of religion ring true. But, making the inclusion of ‘superhuman beings’—those “that do things you and I cannot do”—sufficient to the definition of religion. It is alternately counterfactual (Theravada, Chan or Zen Buddhism, Confucianism, Jainism and others), or not restrictive enough (does every such being qualify? viz. Schwarzeneggers Terminator?), or logically ‘uninteresting’—is reference to superhuman beings alone what makes a discourse religious, or is it their being ‘worshipful’?