The collateral damage from Islamicism

At first sight, there seems to be an inconsistency about the penchant that secular fundamentalism has for bundling all religion in with Islamicism – after all, there are many Muslims, and members of other faiths, who utterly repudiate the beliefs and actions of Islamicism.

Perhaps the secular fundamentalist can argue that all religion is, in essence, as irrational as Islamicism – perhaps the implication of their position is that, “If Islam can produce such extremism, there’s no brake of rationality in any other religion to hold it back from the same possibility”. After all, recent events in Sri Lanka remind us that it wasn’t Islamicists who sparked off the contemporary practice of suicide bombing. In other words, it can be argued that all religions are potentially as dangerous as each other.

There’s also another dimension to this issue that the religiously minded need to take to heart: using the abuse of one faith as an excuse for expressions of interfaith contempt is an invariably ugly spectacle to the non-religious.

It has been argued that the antidote to “bad” religion is not necessarily no religion – instead, one antidote may be “good” religion. Perhaps “good religion” needs to distance itself from “bad religion”? But, in so doing, it falls into the secular fundamentalist trap of providing evidence of the view that, “All religion inevitably fosters conflict”.

When those who subscribe to “good” religion speak against “bad” religion, they appear to be adding fuel to the flames of religious conflict; when they remain silent, they fail to show that there is a religious critique of “bad” religion – that there’s a kind of moral and epistemological equivalence between all religious world views. It seems that the religious are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.