{"id":422,"date":"2011-05-03T07:55:01","date_gmt":"2011-05-03T11:55:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/?p=422"},"modified":"2011-05-03T08:26:21","modified_gmt":"2011-05-03T12:26:21","slug":"what-bin-ladens-death-does-for-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/05\/what-bin-ladens-death-does-for-us.html","title":{"rendered":"What Bin Laden’s death does for us"},"content":{"rendered":"

Does the killing of Osama Bin Laden mean the end of the Great Islamist Jihad? Over at ReligionDispatches<\/a>, Mark Juergensmeyer surmises that the jihadi revolution may indeed be over, but more thanks to the peaceful protests of Tahrir Square than to the well-executed hit on the compound in Abbottabad. It’s a happy thought, and if it turns out that Abbottabad does no more than symbolize the guttering out of militant Islamism in our time, so much the better.<\/p>\n

Will it also put a stop to the war against Islam that infected the last election cycle<\/a>? When someone declares a religious war on one side, the other side has a hard time resisting the narrative–as happened among Muslims in Palestine in the wake of the First Crusade.<\/p>\n

After 9\/11, George W. Bush did put up some serious resistance, insisting that Islam was a religion of peace, casting the U.S. military response as a war on terror, and inviting imams to the White House. But once he left office, his Republican co-religionists did not scruple to embrace anti-Muslim agitation. Yesterday, one of them, the redoubtable Michele Bachmann, expressed the hope<\/a> that Bin Laden’s death would be “the beginning of the end of Sharia-compliant terrorism.” What I’m hoping is that it will be the beginning of the end of sharia-phobic politics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Does the killing of Osama Bin Laden mean the end of the Great Islamist Jihad? Over at ReligionDispatches, Mark Juergensmeyer surmises that the jihadi revolution may indeed be over, but more thanks to the peaceful protests of Tahrir Square than to the well-executed hit on the compound in Abbottabad. It’s a happy thought, and if…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[28,3,27],"class_list":["post-422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-abbottabad","tag-jihad","tag-osama-bin-laden"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Bin Laden's death does for us - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/05\/what-bin-ladens-death-does-for-us.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What Bin Laden's death does for us - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Does the killing of Osama Bin Laden mean the end of the Great Islamist Jihad? 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=422"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":424,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422\/revisions\/424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}