LESSON 9

THE
GLOBALIZATION OF
RELIGION
 OBJECTIVES
Discuss the significance of religion in
one’s life
Explain how globalization affects
religious
practices and beliefs
Analyze the relationship between
religion and global conflict, and
conversely, global peace.
 Timeline: the Rise, Spread and
Fall of the Islamic State

The Islamic State – also known as ISIS, ISIL, or

Daesh – emerged from the remnants of al Qaeda
in Iraq (AQI), a local offshoot of al Qaeda
founded by Abu Musab al Zarqawi in 2004.
It faded into obscurity for several years after the
surge of U.S. troops to Iraq in 2007.
But it began to reemerge in 2011.
Over the next few years, it took advantage of
growing instability in Iraq and Syria to carry out
attacks and bolster its ranks.
The group changed its name to the Islamic
State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in 2013.
ISIS launched an offensive on Mosul and Tikrit
in June 2014.
On June 29, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi
announced the formation of a caliphate
stretching from Aleppo in Syria to Diyala in Iraq,
and renamed the group the Islamic State.
A U.S.-led coalition began airstrikes against
ISIS in Iraq on August 7, 2014, and expanded
the campaign to Syria the following month.
On October 15, the United States
named the campaign “Operation
Inherent Resolve.”
Over the next year, the United States
conducted more than 8,000 airstrikes in
Iraq and Syria.
ISIS suffered key losses along Syria’s
border with Turkey, and by the end of
2015, Iraqi forces had made progress in
recapturing Ramadi. But in Syria, ISIS
made gains near Aleppo, and still firmly
held Raqqa and other strongholds.
In 2015, ISIS expanded into a network of
affiliates in at least eight other countries. Its
branches, supporters, and affiliates
increasingly carried out attacks beyond the
borders of its so-called caliphate.
In October, ISIS’s Egypt affiliate bombed a
Russian airplane, killing 224 people. On
November 13, 130 people were killed and
more than 300 injured in a series of
coordinated attacks in Paris.
And in June 2016, a gunman who pledged
support to ISIS killed at least four dozen
people at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
By December 2017, the ISIS caliphate
had lost 95 percent of its territory,
including its two biggest properties,
Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, and
the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, its
nominal capital.
The Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al
Abadi declared victory over the Islamic
State in Iraq on December 9, 2017.
But ISIS was still inspiring and carrying
out attacks all over the world, including
New York City.
Religion in the
New Global
War
 When Mohammed Atta boarded the airline on September 11,
2001 that soon thereafter slammed into the World Trade
Center towers, he left behind a manual of instruction.
Apparently prepared by his colleagues in the al Qaeda
network, it instructed him and his fellow activists how to
behave and what to do in preparation for their fateful act.
What is interesting about this document is not only the text,
but the subtext.
 Lying beneath the pious rhetoric of the manual and its eerie
ties to the World Trade Center tragedy are hints about the
perplexing issue of the role of religion in the contemporary
world, and answers to the persistent question, how could
religion be related to such vicious acts of political violence?
 The common sense way of putting this question about the
September 11 attack and all of the other recent acts of
religious terrorism is “what’s religion got to do with it?”
The common sense answers to this question
are varied, and they are contradictory.
On the one hand, some On the other hand, there
political leaders—along are the radio talk show
with many scholars of hosts and even a few
comparative social scientists who
religion—have assured us affirm that religion,
that religion has had especially Islam, has had
nothing to do with these everything to do with
vicious acts, and that it—and not just ordinary
religion’s innocent images religion, but a perverse
have been used in strain of fundamentalism
perverse ways by evil and that has infected normal
essentially irreligious religion and caused it to
political actors. go bad.
 THE ROLE OF RELIGION
The authority of religion  In this sense, then, the
has given bin Laden's attack on the World Trade
cadres the moral Center was very religious. It
legitimacy of employing was meant to be
violence in their assault catastrophic, an act of
on the very symbol of biblical proportions.
global economic power.  Though the World Trade
It has also provided the Center assault and many
metaphor of cosmic war, other recent acts of
an image of spiritual religious terrorism have no
obvious military goal, they
struggle that every
are meant to make a
religion has within its
powerful impact on the
repository of symbols-- public consciousness.
the fight between good
and bad, truth and evil.
These are acts meant for
television.
They are a kind of perverse
performance of power
meant to ennoble the
perpetrators' views of the
world and to draw us into
GLOBAL
WAR
 ACTS OF RELIGIOUS
TERRORISM
The September 11 attack and
many other recent acts of
religious terrorism are skirmishes
in what their perpetrators
conceive to be a global war.
This battle is global in three
(1) The choices of targets have
often been transnational. The
World Trade Center employees
killed in the September 11 assault
were citizens of 86 nations.
(2) The network of perpetrators
was also transnational: the al Qaeda
network that was implicated in the
attack--though consisting mostly of
Saudis--is also actively supported
by Pakistanis, Egyptians,
Palestinians, Sudanese, Algerians,
Indonesians, Malaysians, Filipinos,
and a smattering of British, French,
Germans, Spanish and Americans.
(3) The incident was global in its
impact, in large part because of the
worldwide and instantaneous
coverage of transnational news media.
This has been terrorism meant not
only for television but for global news
networks such as CNN--and
especially for al Jazeera, the Qatar
based news channel that beams its
talk-show format throughout the
Middle East.
 EMPOWERING RELIGION
Such religious warfare not only gives
individuals who have engaged in it the illusion
of empowerment, it also gives religious
organizations and ideas a public attention and
importance that they have not enjoyed for
many years.
In modern America and Europe, the warfare
has given religion a prominence in public life
that it has not held since before the
Enlightenment, more than two centuries ago.
3 Common Attitudes Of
Violent Religious
Movements In Society

by Pierre Bourdieu,
A French Sociologist
1. First, they reject the
compromises with liberal
values and secular
institutions that most
mainstream religion has
made, be it Christian,
Muslim, Jewish, Hindu,
2. Second, radical religious
movements refuse to
observe the boundaries
that secular society has
set around religion--
keeping it private rather
than allowing it to intrude
3. These movements try to
create a new form of religiosity
that rejects what they regard as
weak modern substitutes for
the more vibrant and
demanding forms of religion
that they imagine to be
essential to their religion's
Transnational Religion
and Multiple
Globalizations
✓ Migration of faiths across the
globe has been a major feature of
the world throughout the 20th
century.
✓ Transnational religion emerged
through the post-World War II.
✓ Two distinct blends of religious
universalism and local particularism.
✓ It is possible for religious
universalism to gain the upper hand,
whereby religion becomes the
central reference for immigrants.
Religion transnationalism- “religion
going global”.
✓ It is possible for local ethnic or
national particularism to gain or
maintain the most important place
for local immigrant communities.
Religion in Global
Conflict
✓ Religious ideas, values, symbols and
rites relate to deep issues of existence;
it should not be surprising when religion
enters the picture in times of crisis.
✓ The emergence of globalization
brought with it three (3) enormous
problems, namely:
• Identity
• Accountability
• Security
Religion provides answer to
these concerns:
✓ It provides a sense of identity
✓ Traditional religious
leadership provides a sense of
accountability
✓ Religion offers a sense of
security
 INDIVIDUAL ACTIVITY

 Express your understanding

about this phrase “UNITY in
DIVERSITY” in an illustration, or
drawing showing the
interconnectedness of
globalization and religion.