R. Joseph Hoffman, ed., New York: Prometheus Books, 2006. 303 pages.

The fifteen chapters of this book bring together scholars from a variety of fields to examine and analyze what they perceive to be a relationship between religion and violence. Generating a feeling of déjà vu, they rehash previously developed assumptions, arguments, and biases that tend to ignore underlying causes related to the “existence of the sacred,” for reasons apparently beyond the domain of secular comprehension. The articles reiterate conventional secular arguments about the dangers of religious convictions on “peace” and tend to vary in quality and consistency, which reflects on the book’s overall merit.

Although it is not feasible to go into each chapter’s details, it is important to underscore their basic thrust and common theme: the issue of legitimation and what confers legitimacy on action, be it violent in nature, such as in war or conflict, or simply legal and organizational. Hector Avalos (chapter 6) puts it candidly. In the “relative” framework of “empirico-rationalism,” he argues that religious violence is always “immoral,” positing that “life,” as a manifestation of that which “exists,” is worth more than that which does not exist (p. 113). However, this does not preclude war in the absolute. One arrives at this conclusion after reading J. Harold Ellens’ “The Obscenity of War” (chapter 2) as well as the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion’s (CSER) “Protocol on Religion, Warfare, and Violence” (chapter 15).

Ellens, who wrote the first article, has been a soldier for fifty years and is a self-proclaimed hater of war who nevertheless supports American aggression against Iraq (p. 34). His argument boils down to the illegitimacy of war if carried out in the name of religion, but its legitimacy if launched in the name of what he terms the “imperative evil expedience.” In other words, war, as it were, is obscene if conducted in God’s name but justifiable if pursued in the name of American interests. For this, he provides rather tenuous and factually erroneous claims for the invasion of Iraq: Saddam Hussain supported al-Qaeda, which is simply not true even by the American leadership’s own admission, and that this war was imposed on the United States by 9/11, an attack with which the Iraqi regime had nothing to do. Of course he does not forget to mention Saddam Hussain’s support of PLO “suicide” bombings against Israel, never questioning whether this could be justified by the same principle of “imperative evil expedience” (p. 45, footnote no. 3). If war and violence can be justified by what he chooses to construct based on faulty assumptions and manufactured “facts,” why can it not be justified by reasons other than those of his own choice?

One gets the same impression from the CSER’s textual statement. According to this proclamation, modern warfare calls for a new calculus to be decided at the international level, having the status of international law “without exemption” (p. 279). In other words, it is not the question of war but of the laws governing it. Since existing international law is a largely Eurocentric text, the CSER is, in effect, stating that wars can only be conducted in accordance with “Eurocentric” values, justifications, and, for that matter, permission. Thus, Palestinians must not violently (if at all) resist Israeli occupation and Muslims are “advised” to subject Islam to the same deconstructivist endeavors that revealed Judeo-Christian texts to be artifacts of late Antiquity (pp. 279-80). In essence, Muslims are being told that you have to be like us, a grandiloquent expression of Orientalist textual as well as physical imperialism. Rejecting such offers can only be undertaken at their peril. As the case of Iraq indicates, this is justified by what Judith Lichtenberg (chapter 1), quoting Michael Walzer, calls the “sliding scale,” according to which the more superior one believes one’s “values” to be, the more rules one can violate for the sake of their imposition (p. 23).

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