Religion, Violence, and the Politics of Sanctified Punishment: A Case of Iran’s Islamic State

• In Event: 247 - Regular Session. Redefining the Public Sphere in the Middle East

Abstract

In the contemporary world, we have recently witnessed several different types of religious violence, or violence meted out in the name of religion: religious militancy against secular states, including takfiri violence against “apostate” rulers, global jihadi-type terrorism primarily targeting certain types of infidels, and sectarian takfiri-type violence primarily targeting certain coreligionists. In this paper, I seek to problematize yet another type of contemporary religious violence, or what I call sanctified punishment. Although markedly different from indiscriminate mass murder carried out in God’s name, religiously sanctioned severe or capital punishment may be considered an important type of religious violence of its own. For, given the varied but more or less historically established categories of offense (or “sins”)—such as blasphemy, heresy, and apostasy—and their prescribed punishments, sanctified punishment may potentially have much diffused but sustained impacts on how religion and violence interconnect with each other. In this paper, I will take up a set of related notions in Islam that have sometimes been used to religionize and criminalize what is normally considered an act of no religious import, such as being an armed bandit and a political dissident. I will highlight and discuss issues surrounding “rebellion” (baghy), “waging war against God and His Messenger” (muharabah), and “causing corruption on earth” (ifsad fi'l-ard) and their implications for sanctified violence, in the context of the classical Sunni and Twelver (Imami) Shi‘i jurisprudence as well as in the context of the modern Shi‘i Islamic state of Iran.

Author

• Yasuyuki Matsunaga, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies