300 Book Reviews
violence cannot be interpreted as a radical
misinterpretation or misconstruction of
inherently peaceful religious scriptures and
theologies. Instead, every major religious
tradition can and has been interpreted
in absolutist, exclusivist, intolerant and
openly aggressive terms. It is these inter-
pretations which contemporary religious
extremists draw upon to construct what
they regard to be moral justifications or
even imperatives for their acts of violence.
As Juergensmeyer also highlights, how-
ever, no religion can be reduced to a
single logic or master narrative of violence
and exclusivism; instead, every tradition
also contains a more inclusive blue-
print of inter-religious tolerance and
understanding.
Perhaps the only point of criticism con-
cerns the author’s slightly arbitrary distinc-
tion between religious terrorism and
religious nationalism. Terrorism is defined
in terms of an ideological commitment to
a ‘cosmic war’, and the absence of a
concrete political agenda or of any will-
ingness to participate in electoral politics.
Nationalism is described as an active force
in the Realpolitik, where it may constitute
a ‘serious alternative to secular rule’
(p. 214). However, Juergensmeyer’s own
discussion of Sikh militancy and Hindu
nationalism appears to imply that in cer-
tain contexts the line between religious
terrorism and religious nationalism is
blurred. The same may be said about the
conflicts in Northern Ireland, Bosnia and
Kosovo. Borrowing from the anthropol-
ogist Stanley Tambiah, we may thus
subsume both phenomena under what
Tambiah describes as the contemporary
‘politicisation of ethnicity’. If violence
is seen to be a common denominator
between certain movements of religious
nationalism and Juergensmeyer’s examples
of religious terrorism, some of his con-
clusions may appear questionable. For
example, his opposition of ‘peripheral’
militants to the social mainstream may be
no longer applicable. Similarly, the social
 2000 Academic Press
base of religious militancy may then
have to be broadened and religious vio-
lence may have to be looked upon as
endemic rather than merely semiotic or
performative.
These minor points notwithstanding,
Juergensmeyer’s book is a work of superb
scholarship which is likely to make a
lasting contribution to our understanding
of an issue with profound significance.
In his treatment of the ‘global rise of
religious violence’, the author strikes a
remarkable balance: he never trivializes
the horrific consequences of religious
terrorism, while he avoids the common
projection of religious violence onto a
simplistically pathological ‘other’.
CHRISTIAN KARNER
University of Nottingham
doi:10.1006/reli.2000.0252, available online at
http://www.idealibrary.com on
Richard King, Orientalism and Religion:
Postcolonial Theory, India and the ‘Mystic
East’. London and New York, Routledge,
1999, x+283 pp., $75, £45 (hardback)
ISBN 0 415 20257 4, $24.99, £14.99
(paperback) ISBN 0 415 20258 2.
Orientalism and postcolonial theory have
received little attention within the study of
religion. Richard King’s contribution is
therefore welcome as an account of the
general significance of debates surround-
ing postcolonial theory for the study of
religion. The book is particularly useful as
a survey of relevant literature. Those who
wish to familiarise themselves with the
significance of these trends may find the
book a helpful resource.
In one volume, King gives an account
of the formation in the West of concepts
which have structured the study of
Eastern religious traditions. ‘Mysticism’,
‘religion’, ‘world religions’, ‘Hinduism’
and ‘Buddhism’, for example, have
been formed in the Western secular mind
from its inheritance of the categories of

Christian theology. The Enlightenment
distinction between the political and the
religious separates the public, institutional,
secular and rational dimensions of life
from the private, experiential, sacred
and irrational ones. This distinction within
Enlightenment thought has been pro-
jected onto that between West and East.
Eastern religion is identified as the ‘mysti-
cal other’, both by those who seek to
disparage it and maintain the superiority
of the rational, secular West, and by
those who in Romantic reaction against
rationalism seek wisdom in the ‘Mystic
East’. The claim of the critic of Oriental-
ism is that Western cultural identity has
been maintained, in the absence of its
own unifying principle, by projection
of and distinction from the Oriental
other.
The objects of study in the discipline of
religion have, to some extent, been the
creations of scholars: drawing on the
Christian theological emphasis on texts
and the Greek philosophical emphasis
on ideas or essences, epitomized by
Augustine’s distinction between the his-
torical Church and the City of God,
‘world religions’ or ‘great traditions’ have
been idealized and largely theoretical con-
structs, lending authority to an indigenous
elite but bearing little resemblance to the
actual religious expression of humankind.
Brahmanical forms of religion, particularly
the Vedanta and those emphasizing the
Gita, together with elite scholarly forms of
Buddhism, have been elevated in both
theory and reality as those which corre-
spond to Christian ideas of a ‘faith’: they
make assertions which may be true or
false. King points out that one does not ask
whether Russian or Spanish culture is true
or false, and we do not need to in order to
understand them. Similarly, if ‘religions’
are understood as cultures or traditions
rather than beliefs, then the implicit value
judgments by which the West maintains
its own superiority in its depiction of the
East are no longer necessary.
Book Reviews 301
There is nothing new in this. The
requirements of good scholarship, includ-
ing hermeneutic attention to context and
anthropological and sociological perspec-
tives, have for a long time provided an
effective counter-balance to the theologi-
cal inheritance of an earlier generation of
scholars of religion. Moreover, King’s use
of ‘genealogy’, the method of identifying
the meaning of concepts by tracing their
earlier uses, does not escape the dangers of
the genetic fallacy: there is no reason to
suppose in advance that contemporary
scholars of religion use ‘religion’ in a sense
which derives from Lactantius rather than
Cicero; in practice, each definition should
be examined with care to explore its actual
presuppositions (as does Talal Asad for
Clifford Geertz’s definition, in Genealogies
of Religion, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1993). Foucault’s own
use of ‘genealogy’ explored the arising of
new meanings for concepts in line with
changing distributions of power relations.
The critic of Orientalism, who attempts to
uncover an existing power dynamic by
appealing to a previous episteme, corrupts
the very method it claims to be using.
Let me be clear: while I am in sympathy
with King’s position, I do not believe that
he has constructed his argument in a way
which will change the practice of con-
scientious scholars of religion. King’s
work is largely derivative, and while many
others who maintain the inseparability of
politics and knowledge are clear about
their political stance, King is less clear
about his own. In so far as he appeals
to respectful understanding of other tra-
ditions, his motivation is simply that of
good secular scholarship.
King’s work becomes more interesting
when he places secular understandings of
religion within their own political context.
He raises an awkward question: ‘to what
extent does the secular study of religion
subvert or devalue religious beliefs and
explanations of the world?’ (p. 43). We
may note in passing that this question
302 Book Reviews
reveals its own theological and rational
inheritance in being concerned primarily
with belief and explanation. It is here that
problems of truth, authority and power are
located. Evidence that devaluation does
take place is to be found in the compara-
tive study of mysticism: the dominant,
social constructivist approach to compara-
tive mysticism, exemplified by Steven Katz
and Grace Jantzen, effectively undermines
the authority and truth of those traditions
which aim explicitly at the production of
unmediated, uninterpreted experiences.
The fact that mystical truth claims have
been used to ligitimate authority is not in
itself a reason to deny the truth of the
claims. King is thus wary of attempts to
reduce religious to political discourse,
and of the monotony of a post-Orientalist
discourse which simply speaks of its
own formation and power relations. His
juxtaposition of Indian and Buddhist
philosophies of constructivism with
contemporary Western ones is potentially
illuminating.
King therefore calls for a comparative
dialogue between and within cultures. He
attacks the adoption of a single cultural
perspective as adhering to the ‘myth of
cultural isolationsim’. It is not yet clear on
what basis such a dialogue may proceed.
Cultures certainly do interact and affect
each other, yet without a common basis
for dialogue, there are few criteria by
which a Western scholar can assess the
truth and value of Indian philosophical
perspectives. In short, the cultural per-
spective on religious traditions lacks the
means by which theological, metaphysical,
ethical and political judgments can be
made. If religion, culture and power are
mutually implicated, then such judg-
ments are unavoidable and will continue
to be made on the basis of tradition.
Those who support the significance of
cultural politics for the study of religion
have been criticised for exaggerating the
power of a marginal academic discipline.
In practice, preconceptions about religion
 2000 Academic Press
fill the consciousness of the public, the
media and government officials; it is here
that cultural politics passes through the
concept of religion. Public consciousness
maintains confidence in itself by assuming
that there exists an authenticated knowl-
edge of religion, conducted by scholars,
which supports its conclusions. The actual
site of the scholarly study of religion is
therefore an important political site, even
if it has a limited audience and little
effective power. That such a study should
be published primarily in the English
language through the medium of US and
European journals and publishing houses
itself reveals a colonial distribution of
power continuing within the discipline.
PHILIP GOODCHILD
University of Nottingham
doi:10.1006/reli.2000.0254, available online at
http://www.idealibrary.com on
Karen Armstrong The Battle for God.
New York, Knopf, 2000, xvi+371 pp.,
$27.50 ISBN 0 679 43597 2.
Karen Armstrong is a former nun whose
History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (New
York, Knopf, 1994), was a best seller for
months. She has now written a new book
entitled The Battle for God, which concerns
‘fundamentalism’ in Judaism, Christianity
and Islam. Armstrong is aware that this
term is controversial, but chooses to use it
for lack of a better alternative.
Armstrong argues that fundamentalism
is ‘a reaction against the scientific and
secular culture that first appeared in the
West’ (p. xi). She appears to define
‘modernity’ primarily in terms of the dis-
placement of myth by ‘rational, pragmatic,
and scientific thought’ (pp. xiii–xvi). The
result of this displacement, she claims, is a
spiritual void and a desperate yearning
for the certainty once provided by faith
(p. 370). One way that persons have
attempted to fill this void is by turning