Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Contributors Foreign words Introduction Madawi Al-Rasheed and Marat Shterin, Between death of faith and dying for faith: reflections on religion, politics, society and violence Part I: Understanding religiously motivated violence Chapter 1 Apocalypse, history, and the empire of modernity John Hall Chapter 2 Martyrs and martial imagery: exploring the volatile link between warfare frames and religious violence Stuart Wright Chapter 3 Violence and new religions: an assessment of problems, progress, and prospects in understanding the NRM-violence connection J. Gordon Melton and David G. Bromley Chapter 4 Of ‘cultists’ and ‘martyrs’: the study of new religious movements and suicide terrorism in conversation Massimo Introvigne Chapter 5 In God’s name: practising unconditional love to the death Eileen Barker Chapter 6 The terror of belief and the belief in terror: on violently serving God and nation Abdelwahhab El-Affendi Part II: Religiously motivated violence in specific contexts Chapter 7 Rituals of life and death: the politics and poetics of jihad in Saudi Arabia Madawi Al-Rasheed Chapter 8 The Islamic debate over self-inflicted martyrdom Azam Tamimi Chapter 9 The radical nineties revisited: jihadi discourses in Britain Jonathan Birt Chapter 11 al-Shahada: a centre of the Shiite system of belief Fouad Ibrahim Chapter 12 Urban unrest and non-religious radicalization in Saudi Arabia Pascal Ménoret and Awadh al-Utaybi Chapter 13 Bodily punishments and the spiritually transcendent dimensions of violence: a Zen Buddhist example Ian Reader Chapter 14 Jewish millennialism and violence Simon Dein Part III: Reporting religiously motivated violence Chapter 15 Sacral violence: cosmologies and imaginaries of killing Neil Whitehead Chapter 16 Journalists as eyewitnesses Noha Mellor Chapter 17 Understanding religious violence: can the media be trusted to explain? Mark Huband Index

Promotional Information

From India to Iraq, from London to Lahore, the relationship between religion and violence is a bitterly contested and casually misrepresented issue. This volume brings together several perspectives from a variety of fields to probe it. It seeks to shift analytical focus on to the contexts in which violence is expressed, enacted and reported.

About the Author

Madawi Al-Rasheed is Professor of Anthropology of Religion at King's College London. Marat Shterin is a Lectuer in Sociology of Religion at King's College London.