Dangerous Beliefs and Seductive Images: the Literature of Religious Violence in the “Secular” West
Course Description:
Can religion be held responsible for violence? How do images—both visual and literary—spark our imagination? These two seemingly disparate questions have become more closely connected in the wake of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack and the subsequent debates over freedom of expression. The opening of the twenty-first century has witnessed terrible violence perpetrated by self-declared religious-political movements, from ISIS in Iraq and Syria to the extremist branches of the Hindu nationalist movement in India. Responding to these conflicts, we have come to think of the threat of religious violence as a particularly contemporary problem, a problem that stems from a clash of cultures: peaceful modern secularism against violent primitive fanaticism. This clash is often represented as threatening modern freedoms as well as human lives—where liberal societies build museums and foster a free press, religious extremism targets concerts and destroys ancient artifacts. Historians and sociologists of religion, however, have recently started to challenge this view. They argue that modern western states were born from the tumults of early modern religious wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. In this class we will explore how the concept of nation-state that developed in the Renaissance is deeply implicated with our current war on terror. We will ask: how are religious beliefs used to justify acts of violence and what are the origins of the separation of state and religion that characterize the secular west? Alongside this question, we will explore how artistic expressions—from paintings to poetry and from sculptures to tragedies—have come to be seen as important weapons in ideological and cultural fights.