Attributing violence to single religious agents obscures complex multi-actor networks.

Evidence

It would be easy to point to innumerable “secular” agents who have perpetrated acts of great cruelty. But such attempts at defending “religion” are less interesting than asking what it is we do when we assign responsibility for “violence and cruelty” to specific agents. One answer might be to point out that when the CIA together with the Pakistani Secret Service encouraged, armed, and trained religious warriors to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, when the Saudi government facilitated the travel of volunteer fighters from Arabia to that country, we had an action with several part-agents, networks of actors in an evolving plot. There was no single or consistent motive for that complex action not only because there were several part-agents but also because of the diverse desires, sensibilities, and self-images involved. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 58

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Afghanistan mujahideen example often cited in post-9/11 critiques of attributing terrorism to ‘religious’ motives; parallels the framing in ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ about how Western agency is laundered out of narratives.