Nation-Building, Meaning-Making and Sacrifice
Part III of Ivan Strenski's Paper
Sacrifice, Gift and the Social Logic of Muslim ‘Human Bombers’
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Ivan Strenski is the Holstein Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He is recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the sociology of religion.

The main reason nation building reeks so of religion is because nationalism is exposed as religious. Nations are, like religions, meaning-making entities of a grand and transcendent sort, creating an aura of sacredness about their central doings. Not only do national borders mark boundaries of a sacred precinct as ‘tabu’ to the intruder (as do any temple’s holy of holies), but also the accessories of nationalism—its flags, monuments and anthems—partake of the same transcendent religious glow as a sacred being.

In terms of national ritual, nationalism has taught us that ‘sacrifice’ will routinely be required of individual citizens. In sacrifice the nation (and religions of certain kinds) are revealed as the highest forms of collectivity demanding human loyalty, transcending palpable human individuality. Thus far at least, for all the efforts of universal cosmopolitan ‘humanity’ to rally people to common human causes, it has yet to outdo the nation or religion in calling forth the loyalty of people and in getting them to lay down their lives.

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Despite the extremity of radical Islam’s interpretation of sacrifice, these goals must be understood through the interpretive lens of sacrifice. They are sacrifice bombings as much as martyrdoms or suicide/homicide bombings. We need to understand what other—sacrificial—goals the deaths and immolations are meant to bring about.

The kinds of extreme sacrifices of giving up are not arguably the normative sacrifices, or what mainline Muslims do. Human sacrifice is precisely what Abraham finally did not do, and what the Abraham-inspired religions eventually declined to engage in at a certain point in their development.
These suicides or homicides are sacrificial gifts of an extreme sort, offered to attain something in exchange—Palestine—to keep it alive, to realize it, to create it, in return for the sacrifice of young lives.

The main reason nation building reeks so of religion is, then, because nationalism is exposed as religious. Whatever else they may be, nations are, like religions, meaning-making entities of a grand and transcendent sort, creating an aura of sacredness about all their central doings.
Not only do national borders mark boundaries of a sacred precinct as ‘tabu’ to the intruder (as do any temple’s holy of holies), but also the accessories of nationalism—its flags, monuments and anthems—partake of the same transcendent religious glow as a sacred being.

In terms of national ritual, nationalism has taught us notably that ‘sacrifice’ will routinely be required of individual citizens in one form or another. In sacrifice the nation (and religions of certain kinds) are revealed as the highest forms of collectivity demanding human loyalty, transcending palpable human individuality. Thus far at least, for all the efforts of universal cosmopolitan ‘humanity’ to rally people to common human causes, it has yet to outdo the nation or religion in calling forth the loyalty of people and in getting them to lay down their lives.

Whether the same can be said for the newer trans-national ambitions of al-Qaeda remains to be seen. Part of the larger significance of attempts of trans-national religious movements, like al-Qaeda, as briefly successful in Taliban Afghanistan, or recently as threatened in Indonesia, is precisely to challenge and overwhelm the nation-state. How the nation-state will react to such attempts to usurp its monopoly over the use of force within its own borders remains to be seen.

Benedict Anderson has argued that the readiness of individuals to kill others, and to sacrifice themselves, can only be understood in terms of the religious nature of fellowship achieved by the nation-state—that place where religion and nation are not usefully distinguishable. People do not sacrifice themselves for ‘administrative units’, such as the EU, but for nations—whether actual or imagined—like Bosnia, Serbia, Ireland, Israel and Palestine, or potentially for religions like Islam or Christianity.

We would be wise to pay attention to differences in language about violence in politics corresponding to differences in fundamental viewpoint. From an Israeli viewpoint, the independence struggle was fought for the imagined community of the ‘nation of Israel’, and not for the ‘mandate of Palestine’—even though the two territories are virtually identical. In that struggle, the deaths of Jewish fighters counted as ‘sacrifices’ and martyrdoms, and not—as the British, who were arrayed against them, insisted—as ‘terrorist atrocities’.

Similarly, from a contemporary Israeli view that seeks to contain or deny Palestinian ‘nationality’, those who die in so-called suicide or homicide bombing are ‘murderers’ ‘terrorists’ or pathetic madmen. But, seen from the viewpoint of those who want to make the imagined community of Palestine into a nation-state, these suicide or homicide ‘bombers’ are better seen as ‘sacrifice’ bombers, martyring themselves for ‘Palestine’, Islam. For them, these deaths are meaningful, and in this way ‘religious’ deaths, not the random acts of madmen or visceral responses of an overly stimulated organism.

Therefore the West Bank and Gaza are not for the Palestinian religious nationalists the ‘administrative units’ that they are for Israel, any more than the imagined community of Israel was regarded as the British Mandate of Palestine for the Jewish independence fighters. The reason that nationalism is so saturated in religious meaning is that ‘administrative units’ do not create meaning while religions and nations do nothing but create meaning—however gruesome it may be.