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27 2 ✦ Securitization of Religion The Basic Discourse In the years following September 11, 2001, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and Nicolas Sarkozy described what appeared to be a fundamentally altered geopolitical landscape in a similar way. All three leaders converged on the notion that a new “war of ideas” had emerged in which discourse mattered as much if not more than military action. The concept of a war of ideas was not a post–9/11 invention, however. The U.S. national security establishment had used the term during the Cold War to describe its worldwide struggle against Communism, which one U.S. official referred to at the time as “‘a 20th century Islam,’ a godless faith in modern guise that fought to annihilate the ‘foundations of Western civilization’” (Peck 2010, 16, 20). But while U.S. Cold War discourses linked Communism to religion through analogy and metaphor, the post–9/11 war of ideas was for Bush, Blair, and Sarkozy quite literally a global religious struggle. A global war was raging between those who embraced true, authentic religious faith as the foundational source of their shared values and identity, and those who would twist, pervert, or “hijack” the teachings of a great world religion, Islam. In the early 1990s, U.S. scholar Samuel Huntington had predicted a global struggle based primarily on religious identity in his books and articles about a “clash of civilizations” (Huntington 1993). According to Huntington , struggles between and among civilizations will occur in the “fault lines” that separate them and might well prove to be “the battle lines of the future” (1). Foremost among these battles, Huntington predicted, will be the conflict between “the West” on one hand and a monolithic “Islamic civilization” 28 ✦ Securing the Sacred (embodied in the world’s “Islamic states”) on the other. Though published more than a decade before 9/11, Huntington’s notion of a clash of civilizations became a potent and popular way to describe events of that day and their aftermath. Pundits and scholars worried that if political elites, especially George W. Bush, talked too explicitly about Islam in public this would play into Osama bin Laden’s hands and help bring into being the very clash of civilizations the U.S. and its allies should avoid. In fact, the 2002 National Security Strategy of the U.S. makes little mention of Islam or religion. Quickly, however, Bush, along with Tony Blair and Nicolas Sarkozy, incorporated the “clash” discourse into their public speeches as a rhetorical foil, basing their interpretation of the geopolitical situation on precisely the opposite claim: there is no clash of civilizations between the West and Islam, all three argued, and those who claim that there is seek to “hijack the teachings of a great religion ,” in the words of Bush. Bush, Blair, and Sarkozy attempted instead to undermine the notion of the clash of civilizations by replacing Huntington’s “clash” with a global war within the religion of Islam, positing an intrareligious struggle that implicated the West, threatened its security, and required Western states to take sides. This global, spiritual struggle for the “soul” of a world religion needed the Western, secular state to harness the very power of religion to fight and win it. It was a struggle in which religion was seen as both part of the problem and part of the solution. In other words, if the War on Terror had a religious component, there was no reason why the Western state too could not harness religion as a weapon. Bush, Blair, and Sarkozy thus sought to short-circuit Huntington’s prediction of intercivilizational war by subsumed it under another, very different narrative. In order for the West to be victorious in this spiritual war, and for the global balance of power to be restored, real, authentic religious faith must triumph over false interpretations or distortions of religion. There can, however, be no distortion if there is no authentic original, and so the authentic, original meaning of religion needs to be elaborated as a referent object for security. In a number of foreign policy speeches, all three present us with a vision of just such a referent object, attaching to religion a chain of signifiers that also need to be defended from the existential threat of pseudoreligion . Specifically, “authentic,” “real,” “modern” religious faith embodies the core ethical principles that all world religions share, especially Islam and Christianity, and coincides with a variety of liberal values such the embrace of...

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