Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

For the holy terrorist, the primary audience is the deity […] The Thugs are our most interesting and instructive case in this respect. They intend their victims to experience terror and to express it visibly for the pleasure of Kali […] there is evidence that Thugs existed in the seventh century, and almost all scholars agree that they were vigorous in the thirteenth, which means the group persisted for at least six hundred years […] The Thugs murdered more than any known terrorist group […] if the significance of a terrorist group is to be understood by these measures, the Thugs should be reckoned the most important ever known.        David Rapoport, “Fear and Trembling: Terrorism in Three Religious Traditions,” pp. 660–2The connection between religion and terrorism is not new. More than two thousand years ago the first acts of what we now describe as terrorism were perpetrated by religious fanatics […] The Thugs engaged in acts of ritual murder designed to serve the Hindu goddess of terror and destruction, Kali […] according to some accounts the Thugs killed as many as a million persons during their twelve hundred year existence […] a murder rate rarely achieved by their modern-day counterparts armed with far more efficient and destructively lethal weaponry.        Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, pp. 88–9Of the many contemporary fictional works to engage with terror and the postcolonial, ... log in or subscribe to read full text