Formulation of the claim
The use of religion and identity in political conflicts and wars is not understood as a purely religious phenomenon, but as a sign of broader crises in modernity.
Explanation
When forms of social rationality falter and the public sphere weakens, identity becomes easy material for mobilization. This use is therefore tied more to extremism and deviation from shared thinking than to the truth of religion itself.
Its place in the book’s argument
This idea broadens the interpretation of conflict, because it links it to the structure of modern crisis rather than to a single isolated cause. In this way, the text moves away from the simplification that makes religion the source of all violence or else makes it entirely innocent, and instead looks into the conditions that drive religion and identity to be turned into tools of political conflict.
Brief evidence
”I will return to this psycho-social-political-religious configuration that strengthens, in contemporary societies, that bad and troubling confusion between three spheres of communication, practical action, and decision-making. By this I mean the religious sphere, the political sphere, and the social sphere. Miskawayh speaks of all this in his book Tahdhib al-Akhlaq when he focuses on the moral and political importance of the habits of civility and refinement that fill good life and adorn it. But we observe in contemporary Islamic contexts that moral thinking, or rather moral concern, has become completely absent. By this we mean the moral thinking related to the foundations of all daily conduct and its cognitive status. This thinking”
Nearby links
Islamic Thought: Critique and Ijtihad Where Is Contemporary Islamic Thought?