Revisiting the Religious Violence Thesis: Minorities in the Middle East

• In Event: Religious Minorities: Tolerance and Persecution

Abstract

Why do ordinary individuals participate in political campaigns involving mass looting, killings, and enslavement against members of another religious group? When do they follow populist leaders stoking religious hatred? Adopting a comparative-historical approach, this paper focuses on acts of mass violence involving the participation of local population and targeting religious minorities in modern Iraq and Turkey. The cases are a) the pogrom targeting Orthodox Greeks in Istanbul in 1955, b) the pogroms targeting Alevi communities in Anatolian towns in from the late 1970s to early 1990s, c) the Simele massacre targeting the Assyrians in the 1930s, and d) the genocidal attack initiated by the self-styled Islamic State against Yazidis in 2014 in Iraq.

This comparative research design addresses the challenge of disentangling the role of religious beliefs from non-religious factors in triggering collective violence against members of an outgroup. What is often labelled as religious violence, colloquially known as “ancient hatreds thesis,” fail to explain long periods of coexistence. has its causes in factors not directly related to differences in belief systems and practices (Cavanaugh 2009; Midlarsky forthcoming). Populist political elites can use religion for instrumentalist reasons to stoke conflict even if a majority of believers do not espouse extremist views (Toft 2007). Nonetheless, religious teachings and beliefs demeaning members of another religion could contribute to their dehumanization, a necessary factor in atrocities against other groups (Livingstone 2011), especially when ethnic and religious differences overlap (Toft, Philpott and Shah 2011). Furthermore, religious beliefs with their promise of otherworldly salvation may motivate individuals to target groups of “unbelievers” at a significant personal cost (Horowitz 2009) and forgo compromise in pursuit of a higher good (Juergensmeyer 2009).

The paper is based on a interdisciplinary theoretical framework that sets up the “religious violence” hypothesis against a number of other hypotheses. The hatred hypothesis, which incorporates the religious violence argument, suggests that members of a group attack members of another group because of preexisting pejorative beliefs that justify such violence across generations (Petersen 2001). The greed hypothesis proposes that members of a group attack members of another group primarily for material gain (Mueller 2000; Snyder 2015; Charnysh and Finkel 2017). The resentment hypothesis focuses on relative positioning of groups and expects that when members of a group, typically majority, experiences a status reversal, typically minority, they are motivated to act violently against members of another group, typically minority, who are perceived to benefit unjustly from this reversal (Petersen 2001; Fiske et al. 2002). The threat hypothesis suggests that members of a group attack members of another group because they fear an attack from the latter (Posen 1993; Straus 2006) or perceive the assertiveness of the latter as a challenge to their group status (Kopstein and Wittenberg 2018). Finally, the guilt hypothesis suggests that members of a group attack members of another group to dissociate themselves from their past allegiances by making the latter responsible for the ancien régime (Snyder 2015).

The paper is based on a rich variety of empirical sources. I conducted dozens of interviews with displaced and non-displaced members of the Yazidi community, Yazidi leaders, and non-Yazidi activists, professionals, politicians, and policymakers involved in Yazidi affairs in Iraq in 2017 and 2018. Additionally, I systematically compile documents related to Yazidi experience in multiple languages (Kurdish, Arabic, and Turkish) Finally, I rely on the extensive secondary literature as well as original sources in primary languages in Kurdish and Turkish to investigate the localized dynamics of violence against Assyrians in Iraq, and Orthodox Christians and Alevis in Turkey.

The empirical analysis shows that under certain conditions historically formed religious differences could play a direct role in triggering violence against members of another religious group. Very much like nation states (Scott 1998), orthodox religious establishments aim to make minorities legible. Minorities whose sets of beliefs remain illegible are more vulnerable to religiously sanctioned violence. From this perspective, hatred of Yazidis qua Yazidis was a necessary role in the scope, intensity, and repertoire of violence targeting them. Lacking the protected status of “People of the Book,” religious justifications of violence against Yazidis have been more readily available and pervasive. In contrast, the dynamics of violence are better captured by other theorized mechanisms in other cases under scrutiny. In particular, resentment played a central role in motivating violence against Orthodox Greeks and Alevis in Turkey, and Assyrians in Iraq.

Author

• Günes Murat Tezcur, University of Central Florida