Bernard Cavanaugh Religion Analysis

To explain that Cavanaugh brings in the example of Bernard Lewis (once heavily criticised by Edward Said in his Orientalism), who in 1990 has coined the term “clash of civilisations”, speaking about Western and Muslim societies (SOURCE). For Lewis, the Muslim confrontation with the Western world “ultimately comes down to a deep struggle against secularism that is explicit and conscious, and a war against modernity that is largely unconscious” (Cavanaugh 196). While the rise of religious fundamentalism is indeed caused by the modernity and is an integral part of it (Cook), it is by far not the case with the Islam and Islamic societies in general, but Lewis made no distinctions. Then Cavanaugh turns to Jurgensmeyer, for whom religion is problematic

In other words, Cavanaugh says that when newborn nationalisms (mostly postcolonial) of Muslim societies show traits, which the West finds unclear, unappealing or simply unknown, it starts branding them as “religious” ones. Such a process makes it impossible for the West to really understand the nature of the Muslim societies, their internal, and external conflicts. By adopting such stance, one immerses oneself into the binary opposition of the West vs. Islam, which is portrayed as the opposition of secularism vs. religion, but does not come closer to understanding the nature of the religious violence. The danger of such a logic is that it “fails to see what modern Muslim militancy [actually] is” (Cavanaugh 229), whose origins, in turn, can not be “separated from Muslim encounters with Western power” (Cavanaugh 230) and are integral reactions to the

The confrontations between Russian and Chechnya conflict take their roots in the 19th century when the Russian empire colonised the Caucasian nation of Chechens in what Edward Said calls the dynastic type of colonisation (ARW PAPER). During the Soviet rule the colonisation included the “reformation of natives’ minds, and integration of local economic histories” (Mudimbe in Lazarus 7) into the broader Soviet context, but before that, the Chechen people survived the Deportation of 1944, when the entire nation was moved to Kazakhstan by Stalin’s order. A marking event, “presented by both individual and collective memories as an indelible suffering” (Campana 132), the Deportation became “a central identity marker” (Campana 132) for the Chechen people. Only 13 years after, in 1957, the Chechens were allowed to return to their homes, many of which were taken by the