Framing "Religious Violence": Colonial Modernity, Time and Space

The effects of the idea that Islam is an oppressive religion that encourages violence can be traced in many areas, from the marginalisation of Muslim minorities to the justification of military interventions. However, there are also criticisms against such theses. Yet, although these criticisms produce arguments against the widespread discourse on Islam's relationship with violence, they do not sufficiently explain why this discourse resonates so easily with modern subjects. In order to fill this gap, this paper proposes that in order to understand modern societies' responses to "religious violence", it is necessary to look at the conditions of the formation of modern subjectivities and focuses on analysing the narrative of religious violence within its conceptual, institutional and historical context rather than understanding it in isolation. To this end, the article should be read as a genealogical study, adopting an approach leaning on critical secular and postcolonial/decolonial studies: Firstly, as an intra-European development, the modern state is founded on the myth of "religious violence" in the "European Wars of Religion". Defining the violence there as "religious" became possible only after the concept of religion underwent certain transformations in the modern period. In addition, a "modern time regime" emerged in which these developments were embedded, and within this regime, religion was positioned as a dynamic of the past and functioned as a temporal other for modern subjectivity. With the European colonial "discoveries", a colonial modern time-space regime emerged in which temporal and spatial references were intertwined and non-Western geographies represented various levels of backwardness. In order to establish these contrasts, subjectivities that are coherent, consistent and based on contrast have been constructed; however, both modern and other subjectivities are ambiguous in nature and contain multiple references. From this point of view, it is even possible to say that it is precisely the constructions of subjectivities that force this coherence and consistency that produce a significant part of the violence of the modern period, including "jihadist terror".