Paul R. Powers
I grew up in Wisconsin and received my BA (1990) in Religion from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and my MA (1992) and PhD (2001) in History of Religions and Islamic Studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School. I am currently Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, where I have worked since 2001. My dissertation explored the treatment of intentions in pre-modern Islamic law and led to the publication of my first book, Intent in Islamic Law: Motive and Meaning in Medieval Sunni Fiqh (Leiden: Brill, 2006). I have also produced a number of articles dealing with the technical details of Islamic legal thought, including ritual law and the law of injury and homicide.
The many and varied relationships between religion and violence have been a running theme in my teaching and research throughout my career. As an undergraduate I was especially interested in religion in South Asia and traveled to India on a study-abroad trip. This was at a time when the conservative Hindu religio-political movement of “Hindutva” was quickly gaining momentum across India, contributing at times to violent clashes between Hindus and Muslims both within India and across the India-Pakistan border. Research I conducted on that trip fed into my senior thesis dealing with the Hindutva movement.
While much of my graduate-level work focused on early and medieval Islamic history and the intricacies of Islamic legal thought and practice, the geopolitical landscape of the time kept questions of religion and violence on the minds of many, very much including most Islamicists. I began graduate school in the immediate aftermath of the first Gulf War, an event that some people claimed involved the Muslim religious identity of participants on both sides of the conflict. I began my job at Lewis & Clark College in the fall of 2001, and the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon occurred during my first few days of teaching. Those events irrevocably altered the entire field of Islamic studies, my own small corner of it included.
I began regularly teaching a course on religious fundamentalism, which I approached comparatively to show that the social forces that generate fundamentalism are hardly the exclusive property of Muslims. A few years ago I added a new course on religion and violence, which overlaps with but is notably distinct from the topic of religious fundamentalism. Upon launching the religion and violence class, I found that the use of religious studies theories was surprisingly rare in the available literature. I pieced together a variety of sources on the sociology of religion for the class, to explore how these might shed light on religion and violence, and I found that this was exactly the approach I wanted to take. I soon hatched a plan to write a book that would fill this gap, and Religion and Violence: A Religious Studies Approach is the outcome of that plan.