10. RELIGIOUS CHALLENGES TO GLOBAL SECURITY

The spectacular aerial assault that brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and punctured the walls of Washington’s Pentagon on September 11, 2001, prompted the American public to realize what most of the rest of the world has known for some time: religion has returned to public life with a vengeance. This attack, in the words of U.S. President George W. Bush, “marked the beginning of the first war of the 21st century.”1 Mr. Bush may be accurate in his statement but virulent religious activism has been a feature of contemporary international politics since the Iranian revolution in 1978–1979, increasing at a seemingly exponential rate in the last decade of the 20th century. For many, the ethnic and nationalist struggles in Eurasia and around the world religion have replaced Marxism as the ideology of protest and revolution. With the exception of the al Qaeda’s transnational Islamic movement, most religious rebels in recent years have served ethnic and ideological struggles with a markedly national flavor. The perpetrators of the terrorist attacks on Moscow apartment buildings, for instance, are widely believed to be Chechen rebels pursuing a separatist political agenda somewhat related to the Muslim culture of the region and only marginally related to Islamic theology and beliefs. In other political separatism movements, religion is more central to ideologies of protest. “Palestine is not completely free, ” a leader of Hamas ’ policy wing remarked, “until it is an Islamic state.”2 This opinion was voiced just a few months before the 1996 elections that brought Yasir Arafat triumphantly into power and fulfilled the Palestinian dream of an independent nation. Yet it was not the kind of nation for which the Islamic activists and Hamas leaders had hoped. The activists refused to run candidates for public office urging their followers to boycott the polls and threatened to continue to carry out political actions (as the Hamas leader called them). Political actions, a series of terrorist attacks including suicide bombings, conducted by a militant faction, have rocked Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and other parts of Israel eve