Summary
William T. Cavanaugh describes our tendency to misread religion, politics, and history.
One of the things that you see in the Middle East is that the myth of religious violence gets used to cast a kind of fog of amnesia over what’s actually going on there. So in 1979, suddenly our television sets are filled with these people chanting “death to America”, and we conclude, oh, they must have had some kind of crazy religious revival and this is evidence of the violence of religion.
What we forget, then, is what’s gone on for the previous 26 years, since, you know, a democratically elected president in Iran was overthrown in 1953 with American and British help, and the Shah of Iran was imposed on the country and ruled with, you know, a kind of organisation of terror for the next 26 years. You know, everybody remembers that the Ayatollah Khomeini instituted an Islamic dress code after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. What they forget is that the Shah had instituted a secular dress code previously. And so there’s just this way in which pinning conflicts on something called “religion” allows us then to forget all of the other factors in the conflicts – which have a lot to do with Western intervention in the Muslim world over the course of the 20th century. But we … it’s very easy to dismiss all that and just concentrate on the idea that these people have had some kind of crazy religious revival and that has, you know, sent the Middle East into chaos.
