THE RELIGIOUS CONFLICTS INCITING EXTREME ATTITUDE AMONG PEOPLE TOWARDS RELIGION: A CASE STUDY OF CONFLICT IN THE NORTH-WEST PAKISTAN

Abstract

The mutual relationship of war and religion is one of the most debated issues in the contemporary scholarship in social sciences. War and religion are related to each other in multiple ways. Most studies explain how religion affects the war; however, some other studies focus on how the war affects the religion and religiosity. This study comes under the purview of the latter set of studies. I have tried to explore and explain how the conflict in the North-western Pakistan in post 2000 era has influenced the religiosity of the affected people in this area. For this purpose I adopted the qualitative approach and mainly relied on the primary technique while collecting the data. I conducted semi-structured interviews in the Districts Khyber, North Waziristan and South Waziristan. Contrary to the earlier researches on the subject, I found that the war (in the study area) has affected the religion and religiosity in a complex way: on the one hand it increased the religiosity among the people as number of practicing Muslims increased during this period in this area, while on the other hand, it has also turned many others as non-religious. Moreover, I observed that this conflict/war caused extreme attitudes among people towards religion as some became ultra-religious while some other became ultra-secular at the same time.