‘the culture of martyrdom is firmlyembedded in its collective psyche

God Almighty hit the United States at its mostvulnerable spot. He destroyed its greatest buildings. Praise beto God.’

BinLaden himself referred to the towers as ‘icons’ not of theUnited States' blasphemy but of its arrogant power.

to strike the WTC a second time

thatthe organizers of the 9/11 attack saw the TwinTowers as deliberately mocking Islamic minarets.

According to one account, Islamic beliefs govern hisbehaviour but, according to the other and no less plausibleaccount, Islamic beliefs merely provide an acceptable pretext.So how can we decide which account is more persuasive inany particular case?

let the world know that they did it toexpress devotion to God or to curry favour with God.

the suicide mission (SM) that shook the world

Where a Christian is so unfortunate as to become a Jew, we order that he shall be put to death just as if he had become a heretic; and we decree that his property shall be disposed of in the same way that we stated should be done with that of heretics.

We also forbid any Jew to dare to leave his house or his quarter on Good Friday, but they must all remain shut up until Saturday morning; and if they violate this regulation, we decree that they shall not be entitled to reparation for any injury or dishonor inflicted upon them by Christians.

a Jew l should be very careful to avoid preaching to, or converting any Chris~i_an, to the end tfiat he may become a Jew, by exalting his own belief and disparaging ours. Whoever violates this law shall be put to death and lose all his property.

A garment belonging to a sick man, 8 a Jew, or a Christian must not be sold without indicating its origin; likewise, the garment of a debauchee.

muf:Jtasi

We recognise that it is destructive to existing patterns; also that it has potentiality. It symbolises both danger and power

No one knows how old are 4 Introduction the ideas of purity and impurity in any non-literate culture: to members they must seem timeless and unchanging.

I believe that some pollutions are used as analogies for expressing a general view of the social order.

But anthropologists who have ventured further into these primitive cultures find little trace of fear.

One was that they were .inspired by fear, the other that they were inextricably confused with defilement and hygiene.

The great achievement of the ethical religions,' he wrote, ~ 'was to shatter the fetters of the kinship group ... [by establishing] a superior community of faith and a common, ethical way of life in opposition to the community of blood, even to a large extent in opposition to the family.'19

One aspect of this transition from segmentary society to state is particularly pertinent to our concern. In the ordinary way face-to-face communities recognize and regard as criminal only specific injuries to specific individuals or groups. A wrong is identified and dealt with when and if the person who has been injured or his representative chooses to take the matter up by way of the socially approved means of redress. By contrast, as the state begins to emerge its rulers seek to assert and extend their authority by creating what are in effect victimless crimes, offences against abstractions such as 'the ruler', 'the state', 'society' or 'morality'. Familiar examples of the process can be seen in the infiltration of such categories into the Germanic law codes of the early middle ages.

Once a pattern of persecution has been established and its victims identified that question becomes so difficult to answer as almost to lose its meaning, and loses also much of its urgency.

The dislocations associated with rapid economic change and particularly with the growth of cities are familiar enough in several periods of European history.

The spiritual ideal which animated the great reforms of the eleventh century was that of paupertas -not poverty, as we con-ventionally translate it, but powerlessness.

Pollution fear, in other words, is the fear that the privileged feel of those at whose expense their privilege is enjoyed. Marked sensit-ivity to the possibilities of sexual pollution may therefore suggest that the boundaries which the prohibitions in question protect are threatened, or thought to be.

sexual power may be a means of expressing or focusing nervousness of those whose functions or value in a society give them much greater importance Purity and Danger 101 than is reflected in their status or influence.

The fear of pollution protects boundaries, and the fear of sexual pollution, social boundaries in particular.

or non-conformity simply, but against criminal error erected into a system'• - in thinking it our business to hold up the sins of our ancestors to the reprobation of their more enlightened descendants. The objection is that the judgements rest on unexpressed and fundamental assumptions about the nature of European society which are historically unfounded, and therefore foster a mistaken understanding of the nature of persecution itself. In particular, Southem's words imply what Hamilton says explicitly, that 'the atti.tude of the clergy was shaped by the society in which they lived, which regarded the persecution of heretics as normal'.5 This is to suppose, first that holders of ecclesiastical - and presumably secular - authority merely reflected sentiment in the society around them, and did not form or direct it, and secondly, that violence and persecution - which are, in any case, by no means the same thing -were simply endemic in the medieval world, a 'norm' which historians must take for granted.

These two judgements epitomize the view against which the argument of this book is directed. The reason for taking issue with them is not a moral or political one. We do not follow Lord Acton -the limits of whose liberalism are sharply exposed in this context by his justification of the persecution of the Cathars as 'not against error

those who bore authority in the church were agents with very limited powers of initiative. They were not free agents. Doubtless they were responsible for some terrible acts of violence and cruelty, among which the Albigensian crusade holds a particu-lar horror. But on the whole the holders of ecclesiastical authority were less prone to violence, even against unbelievers, than the people whom they ruled.

Z. N. Brooke wrote of the legislation enacted by the Third Lateran Council in 1179: 'Finally, a strong decree against the Cathari, Patarines and other heretics shows how much the growth of heresy, especially in the South of France, was at last beginning to disturb the rulers of the church' (my emphasis). 1

That it was in some way natural or appropriate, or at any rate inevitable, that the medieval church should seek to suppress religious dissent by force, has come to be accepted as a matter of course.

ome years ago I asked in an examination paper for school-leavers,

because there were so many of them'

Before starting to write, do two things. First, ensure that you have a strong thesis. There's a good way to tell if you have one, but it takes courage. Write on some notepaper, "I contend that-'' and complete the sentence. Now study what you've written. If somebody else's essay were arguing the same thesis, would you be intrigued by it? Is it complex enough, or controversial enough, to allow for lengthy exposition? Have you really stuck your neck out, or are you pussyfooting? Second, have on hand a list of concrete details and apt quotations, and be ready to use them. Re-member, if you lead off with a string of abstract generalizations, your

back-door approach,

front-door approach. They march into their subject with breathtaking assurance, clearly eager to share their opinions.

"We have evidence that both sides shell themselves in order to create~artic~lar image,'; h~ t~id journalists a f;;-days -bef~~e /"'i met. "I got so frustrated about this a month ago that I said to both sides, 'If you'll stop shelling yourselves, maybe we'll have peace around here.' "

wanted to enlarge the borders of _ · · ude parts of Bosnia (and Croatia), thereby creating a (~Serbia.'' For Milosevic, ~3gp~raJ;cbik wi~ut a future ig~m.Q.Q cy, it was a matter of staying in power by p1;;;;g-the nationalist card.tor hard-core nationalists, it was a mat-t~r of achieving a historical drea1' And for the Bosnians, it was a mghtmare. ~

Was it much different from the Serbs who prudently kept quiet as their Bosnian neighbors were shot or packed off to prison camps?

I simply wasn't interested in the fate of a "filthy" Muslim. Ramiz was on his own.

Journalists have the_same instincts as bloodhounds on t_he sc~RLof a fox.

The Batkovic roadblock was different, manned by four guys who had hunting rifles and tempers hotter than asphalt at noon.

hat when the call of the wild comes, the bonds of civilization turn out to be surprisingly weak, professors turn into nutcases and ev-erything that a generation built up can be destroyed in a day or two, often by the generation that built it. The wild beast had not died. It proved itself a patient survivor, waiting in the long grass of history for the right moment to pounce.

w could they do such monstrous things? How could a man wake up one morning and shoot his neighbor in the face and perhaps rape the neighbor's wife for good measure?

Had she been raped? Tortured? Killed? Or merely cleansed, the best ifate of all, considering the options?

You know, it wasn't the people who wanted to fight. It was the politicians who prepared this stew, and now we can never go back.'

hat wild beast, which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free. The signal was given, the barriers were down. As has so often happened in the history of man, permission was tacitly granted for acts of violence and plunder, even for murder, if they were carried out in the name of higher interests, according ar established rules, and against a limited number of men of a particular type and belief .... In a few minutes the business quarter, based on centuries of tradition, was wiped out.

His enemies spit at him, and the village dogs lick up his dripping blood.

We came across the body of an old man with a mutilated head. They ordered us to drag him toward the bridge. As we were dragging the old one, his skull was falling open and the brain came out. We dragged the body to the bridge and they ordered us to throw it into the Drina. There were two more bodies on the bridge. They had their throats cut. We were ordered to throw them into the river as well. On one of the bodies, four fingers on the left hand were freshly cut off."

"The Muslims left voluntarily. Why, we even supplied the buses. We didn't force them to leave. I swear."

Mat-• tresses were knifed open like pigs for slaughter, drawers were emp-i tied onto the ground, and co.2i_e~ of the Koran-2Yere urinated on. • Dried blood might be spia~red o~--~~~ ~{ ~he walls~-oueveral. I Everything of any value, including lightbulbs, had vanished.

The war came and went quickly, yet it took something away from the city. The Muslims.

If you wanted to find the truth, to find out whether men would act like animals as well as smell like them, you had to leave the sunshine and head for the darkness. There, you would learn that the refugees you felt such pity for in Split were among the luckiest Bosnians of all, because they had escaped the darkness.

A teenage girl explained to me how one of the Muslim men in her village had been nailed to the front door of the mosque, his arms spread out, so that he was like Christ on the cross, and he was still alive at the time.

hey begged their friends to kill them so they would not be captured by the Serbs, who were sure to comb the fields once dawn broke.

All of a sudden, seemingly without reason, they had turned into killers.

o you had to learn about mass arrests, torture, rapes and expulsions, and you needed to understand that it was a system rather than a series of random incidents.

How could she have been on the run with two children for forty-five days?

WEN YOU GROW up in America, you don't really learn h.ciw toul humans can smell, just as you don't learn about the smell 0f death.

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The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. Because I have the greatest respect for the reader, and if he's going to the trouble of reading what I've written-I'm a slow reader myself and I guess most people are-why, the least I can do is make it as easy as possible for him to find out what I'm trying to say, trying to get at.

A prose style may be eloquent, lyrical, witty, rhythmical, and fresh as Montana air, but if it lacks clarity, few readers will stay with it for long. Just as no one enjoys looking at a view, however spectacular, through a mud-streaked window, no one enjoys listening to a symphony of words reduced to mere noise.

tudents will be invited to develop their faculties of critical thought and clear expression by approaching this vital issue from another angle—not as a referendum on religion, but as an exploration of the relationship between symbolic acts of violence and the constitution of “the sacred” in a variety of human cultures.